Lisa Cashmore (University of Southampton)

The role of the hands is largely overlooked in the creation of personal identity, particularly over the course of hominin evolution. Rather than simply being homogenous ‘tools’, the hands can be considered the primary interface between the individual body and the material world. The hands are engaged in diverse facets of daily life, such as tool manufacture and use, parietal art creation, inter- personal interaction, gestural communication and personal grooming. Exploring these manual activities indicates that not all hands are created equal, either for the group or for the individual. Studies at the individual level highlight clear asymmetries in the relative skills and preferences of the left and right hands, differences that are often reflected at the anatomical level. More strikingly, there are seemingly vast inter-individual differences in hand skill between members of a group who master artists, musicians and craftspeople and those of us who are ‘all fingers and thumbs’.

From an evolutionary anatomy perspective, and starting from modern cultural distinctions between the roles of the left and right hands, this paper will explore the contribution of the hands to notions of personal identity. From the archaeological record, parietal art and material culture have the potential to allow us to explore this relationship in extinct hominin species, particularly in the Upper Palaeolithic. Inter-individual grooming in non-human primates and the tool manufacture and use exhibited by some species more provide possible precursors of this relationship prior to the emergence of the genus Homo. Furthermore, this approach could be informative regarding the purported co-evolutionary development of handedness and language capabilities in hominins.