THE HAND

The history of the hand is all about ... time travel, medieval magic, cave painting, royal power, intimacy and grief.

Knock, knock ...

Knock, knock ...

What are your hands doing? Ours are knocking on the door of your brain. They are waking you up. They are starting a conversation. They are starting this conversation – by typing. Yours, presumably, are holding a book or tablet. But how many different ways have you used your hands today? And how many more different ways will you use them before tomorrow? You have presumably got dressed, washed, prepared food, fed yourself, picked up or put down an enormous variety of objects, communicated to yourself by touching or communicated to others by writing, typing or gesturing. Maybe you have shaken hands, waved goodbye, raised your fist in anger or delivered a thumbs-up or 'OK' sign to broker friendship.

Such gestures from the past survive in the present day in a number of forms, but perhaps most powerfully in prehistoric art dating from as far back as 40,000 years ago.

CAVE PAINTING

Hand stencils are a common visual form of prehistoric art. They have been discovered across sites in France, Spain, Africa, Australia, Argentina and Borneo (which are thought to be by far the oldest examples c.40,000 years ago). They were created either by blowing or spraying paint made from charcoal or a pigment called red ochre over the hand, thus creating a type of hand shadow – the most common type of images that survive – or by covering the hand in paint to create a print.

In our evolutionary past the hand was significant because the opposable thumb, fine motor skills and the manual use of tools was a distinctly human characteristic that distinguished Homo sapiens from animals. Hands had significance in prehistory in other practical ways: digits for counting, or the hand's span as a rough and ready way of measuring; the height of horses was also measured in hands. It is no surprise, then, that hands were one of the commonest forms of visual expression in our most ancient history. The compulsion to create art, moreover, is one of the few but crucial things that define us as human, along with the ability to think and plan for the future and also (and here is the historian writing) the ability to remember and learn from the past. These hand stencils, therefore, are not just part of the history of art but evidence for the evolution of the modern human mind; they are a chapter of the very earliest history of Homo sapiens.

The creation of these images is believed to hold some form of magical or ritual significance and we know that, in some locations, the prints would have been extremely uncomfortable for a person to make on their own, and that other prints would have been impossible to make without help. In these single hand prints, therefore, is some of the earliest evidence of human teamwork. In some locations there are so many hand prints in one place that the artwork would have taken both planning and considerable time. They also show a surprising variety of hand shapes, sizes and patterns. Intriguingly, many have been shown with apparently amputated digits. The belief that the images were accurately depicting hands with missing fingers has now been consigned to the past. Our modern understanding focuses on the way that the hand can be manipulated by bending fingers inwards or downwards – in much the same way as it is for shadow puppetry – to make the hand shadow appear unusual.

This in turn suggests that the fingers were somehow significant in ancient communication. Researchers have even tackled the question of who left these prints and it remains uncertain. Recent work has suggested that three-quarters of the surviving Neolithic hand prints from eight cave sites in France and Spain were likely to have been made by women. This research was itself based on the work of a British biologist who discovered that men and women can be identified by the relative lengths of their index and ring fingers.

A HISTORICAL CLUE

This raises the interesting question of the hand as a historical signpost. Not only can hands be 'read' in history for gender, but also in other, simpler ways for differences in age, race and class related to hand size and the colour and condition of the hand's skin. Workers' hands, for example, are often marked by the signs of manual labour, with calluses or fingers lopped off, an indication of the dangers of work, especially among factory operatives. These might be compared to the pampered hands of the pianist or the history professor, or the clerk's hands stained with ink. One Victorian clerk, Benjamin Orchard, wrote bitterly of his lot in 1871:

We aren't real men. We don't do men's work. Pen-drivers – miserable little pen-drivers – fellows in black coats, with inky fingers and shiny seats on their trousers – that's what we are. Think of crossing t's and dotting i's all day long. No wonder bricklayers and omnibus drivers have contempt for us. We haven't even health.

Inky figures were, for the Victorian clerk, a marker of occupation, a stain on their hands that signified their Bob Cratchit-like, lowly place within society.

Hands could be physically distorted, mutilated through agricultural accident or otherwise broken and shapeless through torture. The breaking of hands was one of the techniques of the torturer's trade. In his Latin autobiography the Jesuit priest John Gerard describes his imprisonment in late Elizabethan England, and the torture that he underwent because of his involvement in the networks that surrounded the Gunpowder Plot. His hands were so badly mangled that, at first, he was not able to hold a pen:

I could scarcely feel I had anything between my fingers. My sense of touch did not revive for five months, and then not completely. Right up to the time of my escape, which was after six months, I always had a certain numbness in my fingers.

With broken hands, therefore, he was barely able to write, a clear intention of the torturers: writing was one of the key ways in which imprisoned Jesuits communicated, in secret letters and invisible ink, with the outside world.

Not only could your hands betray you to a historian but also to the law. The 'criminal hand' itself might even be missing – cut off in punishment – or burned as a public branding of criminality. It was a public sign from which it was very difficult to escape. In Tudor England a criminal could escape a death sentence by claiming 'benefit of clergy', in other words saying that they were a member of the...