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http://neurosciencenews.com/evolution-hands-fighting-2917/
"As an alternative, we suggest that the hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist may tell us something important about our evolutionary history and who we are as a species," Carrier adds. "If our anatomy is adapted for fighting, we need to be aware we always may be haunted by basic emotions and reflexive behaviors that often don't make sense – and are very dangerous – in the modern world," says biology Professor David Carrier.
Carrier and his collaborators not only have argued our hands evolved partly for punching but that the faces of human ancestors, the australopiths, evolved to resist punching – and that human faces became more delicate as our violence became less dependent on brute force. The new study sought more experimental evidence for his theory using nine male cadaver arms purchased from the university's body donor program and from a private supply company.
Shoryuken!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Monday October 26 2015, @04:34PM
Hand bones are no more durable than jawbone.
That's without practice and training.
With practice those hand bones can get rather tough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAqnF8GOwl0 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQJ6J4YOjRc [youtube.com]
On a related note:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SHfqn4oGxM [youtube.com]
And if our ancestors that were punching each other (instead of stabbing or clubbing each other like more recent ancestors) walked on their knuckles, I'm pretty sure those hand bones would have toughened up a fair bit.
By the way if this theory is considered plausible, then how about my theory that the main reason humans evolved their long distance running ability was not for persistence hunting but for war? Think about it, war is more selective than hunting. With war the winners breed, the losers often lose their lives AND their children, whereas if you fail with hunting you fallback to fishing or eating berries, nuts and grubs.
Most other animals evolve fast running and other techniques because their prey is a different species - running for hours is a stupidly inefficient time and calorie intensive way to get lunch. Even wild hunting dogs don't run for hours - they use their brains, work together and run for a few minutes.
But War is a different matter. In "old style" wars being able to run for hours till sun-down sure helps more for your survival than being able to run very fast for less than 5 minutes- especially when the predator and prey are the same species and both would thus evolve to achieve a similar ability.
War is far more common in most human tribes than persistence hunting. Even chimpanzees wage war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War [wikipedia.org]
I'm sure a few humans did persistence hunting. Just like a few humans ate only seafood.