A Handy Hello

Waving hello and shaking hands are second nature to us in the modern Western world. We perform these gestures so automatically that we usually take them for granted but, if you dig into them, these hand gestures offer fascinating insights into how we work.

- Terry Robson

Humans, and our hominid relations, are fascinated by their hands and always have been. We know this because our ancestors left evidence of their handy wonder behind for us to find.

The oldest known cave painting is a red hand stencil from the Maltravieso cave in Caceres, Spain. A “stencil” was made by placing the hand on the rock and spreading pigment around the edge of the hand. Publishing their findings in the journal Quaternary Geochronology researchers have dated this Maltravieso hand to 64,000 years ago and believe that it was made by a Neanderthal. Other caves in places like Peche Merle in southwestern France and El Castillo in northern Spain contain human hand stencils that date to around 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. For tens of thousands of years, humans and our cousins have been interested enough in our hands to want to represent them but, in fact, the history of our fascination goes back even further.

In 2021, researchers from Bournemouth University in the UK found human handprints that appear to have been deliberately made in travertine (freshwater limestone) on the high plateau of Tibet. Travertine is deposited from natural waters and when soft it takes an impression but then hardens to form rock. These researchers found five handprints and five footprints that appear to have been deliberately placed. Radiometric dating placed the deposit as dating to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago. In the intervening 200,000 years, humans have not only painted their hands but have crafted exquisite forms of art from all manner of materials into the shape of hands, such as the 2000-year-old hand with delicately long fingers that was carved from mica and found in southern Ohio as part of the Hopewell Mound Group in the 1920s.