Ape Hands

Paolo the nattily dressed English accented zoologist met me before opening at Dublin's Dead Zoo. There is a great podcast of him here. He explained to me all the facts below.

First thing is human skeletons tend to be many different people because that’s just how bones were collected Animals specimens were usually collected for the task so are more complete. With an experts eye Paolo can show you where the animal was shot. for example the apes in the pelvis and the arm

Or in the case of the polar bear 19 times when he wandered into a camp and all the explorers just started blasting away.

Then they ate him. But avoided the liver as that has so much Vitamin D it’ll kill you. Kill you by causing excess bone growth
. "A polar bear's liver contains between 24,000 and 35,000 IU per gram. Compare that to the tolerable upper level of vitamin A intake for a healthy adult human: 10,000 IU’


Onto hands

Orangutans have really short thumbs not going past the knuckle. They also have very curved hand bones. This means they cannot touch their thumb and their little finger. Which is also less little than ours are. Human fingers are shorter and flatter than those of the other apes.

This is because they spend almost all the time in trees so there hands are adapted to just what they need to do in trees

Chimps, Humans and Gorillas on the other hand walk around on the ground. And they think now that the common ancestor of all of us walked around on two feet and only later did the Chimps and gorillas move to knuckle walking. Basically this 2nd image in a google search for ‘evolution’ is wrong

There are arguments over this but it looks like the common ancestor of chimps gorillas and humans did not look like the first guy above more like the second.

Chimps and gorillas hands just look more robust than human ones. Partly because they walk around on them. But there are other adaptations. Chimps walk high up on their knuckles. Not on the back of their hand as I pictured.

They have developed a special bone in their wrist that sticks out so their hand wont flex in a way that hurts them

Gorillas also have ridges and a generally stiffer wrist to allow this weight to be held.

We look like baby versions of the other apes. Our eyes stay big and our face snouts do not grow forward. Baby apes look a lot more similar to us than the adults do for example. Paolo did a special survey on London’s zoo famous Guy The gorilla. Because of his flatter than the average gorilla face people found him especially attractive 


I’d swipe right

Gorillas who walk further down their knuckles also have wrist adaptations but they do not stick out as much. Either way they are not walking on the back of their hands but on their knuckles.

Gibbons swing so much and have so little use for holding tools or computer controllers that their wrist has turned into a sort of ball and socket that allows them to swing more freely between branches 
At this point Paolo took to the trees to show me gibbon locomotion. You don’t get this sort of commitment from people giving brewery tours.

The weirdest primate hand was the Aye-Aye. In Madagascar they didn’t have enough different kinds of things so us primates decided to take over all the jobs. This one deprieves woodpeckers of their gig. It climbs up a tree. Taps on it with one special finger. Listens to the bark one one giant ear. And if it hears some tasty grubs wandering around inside gnaws through the wood with its beaver like teeth. Then with a special long finger sneaks in and scoops out the larva. Imagine having two special fingers one for tapping and one for sticking into holes and scooping.