Humans have more primitive hands than chimpanzees

The human hand is a marvel of dexterity. It can thread a needle, coax intricate melodies from the keys of a piano, and create lasting works of art with a pen or a paintbrush. Many scientists have assumed that our hands evolved their distinctive proportions over millions of years of recent evolution. But a new study suggests a radically different conclusion: Some aspects of the human hand are actually anatomically primitive—more so even than that of many other apes, including our evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee. The findings have important implications for the origins of human toolmaking, as well as for what the ancestor of both humans and chimps might have looked like. Humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor perhaps about 7 million years ago, and their hands now look very different. We have a relatively long thumb and shorter fingers, which allows us to touch our thumbs to any point along our fingers and thus easily grasp objects. Chimps, on the other hand, have much longer fingers and shorter thumbs, perfect for swinging in trees but much less handy for precision grasping. For decades the dominant view among researchers was that the common ancestor of chimps and humans had chimplike hands, and that the human hand changed in response to the pressures of natural selection to make us better toolmakers.


http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/07/humans-have-more-primitive-hands-chimpanzees?rss=1

Based on current animals it does seem that the finger length and time spent in trees/climbing in proportional

it is interesting which came first looking at the larger Primate tree it seems that fingers shortened and then lengthened again in chimps and bonobo



http://www.handresearch.com/news/primatology-palm-reading-primate-hands-family-tree.htm