The hand, an external brain

Let’s imagine the first hominid, about 2 million years ago, picking up an object to look at it closely. He is upright and uses his upper limbs because he no longer needs them to walk on all fours. This simple gesture opened all the possibilities for their evolution and the development of different cultures.

The man went further than the rest of his anthropomorphic “relatives” when he used this new tool. He indeed used gestures, reinforced with mimicry, before words. Through the hands, he becomes superior because he can express emotions, feelings, and attitudes.  Hundreds of printed hands appear in the caves where they took refuge, perhaps to pay homage to this formidable instrument with which he could overcome nature. With them, they made statuettes that expressed their beliefs, performed ritual ceremonies and dances that were part of their daily life. That is how religions begin. In all of them, the hand has its symbolism: that of Fatima for Muslims, for Jewish the hamsa, the different positions in Buddha images and the attitude of blessing or praying with joined hands in Christian iconography.

An ancient thinker, Anaxagoras, believed that a man had become an intelligent being, the most brilliant of the animals using the hands. The hand is an extension of the brain, Kant would say. Thanks to it, the human being performs the functions that his intelligence dictates and externalizes what is inside his soul.

The movements of the palm and its five fingers are an extraordinary vehicle of expression. With gestures, the speaker emphasizes what he says in his speech; a deal is accepted, or a relationship begins with a squeeze; signals of alert or calm, the way forward, love, or rejection are hand marked. It is the clamp to grasp or the palette used to write in the air the ideographic symbols of the Chinese language and the language for the deaf. Palmistry practitioners make their living – stimulating their clients’ fantasy – through reading the hand’s lines.

No one can doubt the hand’s expressive capacity; if not, let’s ask the gladiators of the Roman circus whose fate -life or death- depended on a simple upward or downward movement of the emperor’s thumb.  Let’s remember the “V” of Winston Churchill’s fingers with the meaning of victory, or as a symbol of peace for the hippies; the positive sign of OK, or the raised fist with its different political connotations.

Art, the highest of man’s expressions, is made through that part of the body that makes us “touch” the heights of divinity when it turns us into maximum creators: painters, sculptors, artisans, musicians, writers. The inspiration and the conceived idea are in the creator’s mind, but the hand gives it form and shape to what the imagination dictates. How to make music from an instrument, conduct an orchestra or outline the subtle painter’s stroke or a calligrapher without using that excellent tool? Surely today’s technology can do it, but it will not convey the emotion of a musical director’s hands, the poetry they express in the movements of a classical dancer or the inspiration of a sculptor’s precise and restrained stroke. In our Snowdrop online store, we display an excellent sample of the manual expression of artists and artisans of the world.