Strong fists for defending ourselves and opposable thumbs for work as fine as threading a needle — hand specialisation is widely believed to have given humans a major evolutionary advantage. On Tuesday, scientists in the United States and Spain said the human hand may be more primitive than that of our closest living cousin, the chimpanzee. In fact, human hands are likely more similar to those of the last common ancestor we and chimps shared millions of years ago. ‘These findings indicate that the structure of the modern human hand is largely primitive in nature, rather than the result of selective pressures in the context of stone tool-making,’ said a press summary from the journal Nature Communications, which published the study. In fact, it is the hands of chimps and orangutans that changed most since they split off to form new branches of the hominid

Read More: Human hand more primitive than chimp’s: Study led by George Washington University