The Naked Man by Desmond Morris

Author:Desmond Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409075721
Publisher: Random House

13. THE HANDS

THE MOMENT IN evolution when we stood up on our hind legs and our front feet became our hands was the time we became truly human. Previously our front feet had been forced to compromise between walking and grasping. Now they could concentrate solely on grasping and become perfected for this single task. With improved, fully opposable thumbs, we could take a firm hold on our environment, both metaphorically and literally.

We developed two kinds of grasping action, the power grip and the precision grip. Male and female hands differed in this respect. Males became much better at the power grip and females at the precision grip. The male hand became stronger and the female hand more flexible. And the difference was considerable, male hands being about twice as strong as those of the female. Even today, with inactive husbands who have never seen the inside of a gymnasium, active wives find they sometimes have to ask their mates to open tight-lidded jars.

Civilisation has not been kind to male hands. Once they were the key elements in tribal success, being the part of the body specialised for fashioning, grasping and throwing weapons, essential for the hunt. In their primeval role they were noble features of the masculine body, but today the term manual labour has a less imposing ring to it. The most successful males now only use their power grips during leisure moments, when holding a tennis racket or swinging a golf club.

Male hands are not only much stronger than female hands, they are also much bigger. This gives male pianists an unfair advantage over female performers, because they have a greater span when the fingers are fully spread. It is also useful for male boxers, and anyone who has ever shaken hands with a heavyweight champion will know how strange it is to feel one’s own hand disappearing inside a mass of enveloping flesh. It is said that Muhammad Ali’s fists are one and a half times the size of the average male fist.

Although male hands gained a great deal in power during the course of evolution, they did not lose their sensitivity. Anyone watching the speed with which a blind man can run his hands over a page of Braille will appreciate this. And anyone touching a hot stove will know how sensitive to pain these same finger-tips can be, equipped as they are with literally hundreds of thousands of nerve endings.

The underside of the fingers and the palm of the hand is one of the few places on the male body where no hair will ever grow, and the skin will never tan. Even dark-skinned people have pale palms. Another special feature is that the palms, unlike most of the rest of the body, never sweat in relation to excessive heat. They only sweat in response to stress. When we become anxious our palms start to sweat, always a pitfall for a nervous man who is about to shake hands with someone important. There is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.