Tool use and the hand

Hands are key to our interaction with the world and technology. Thus, hand bones offer a great deal of information about the behaviours of past populations and our ancestors. This chapter details how more traditional osteological methods and emerging methodologies have been used, as well as combined, to chart the development of hand-use and technology from deep-evolutionary time to relatively recent archaeological populations. Modern human manual behaviours, and how they relate to our unique technological abilities, are contextualised within those of other living

species. Fossil and associated stone tool evidence is used to explore how these capabilities evolved in our lineage.

The chapter subsequently synthesises cutting edge studies of soft tissues, their traces, and internal bone morphology to provide a finer-scale picture of manual behaviours in both our fossil ancestors and archaeological populations.