A Handy Hello
Waving and handshakes feel automatic, but they reveal fascinating insights into human behavior if you take a closer look.
Humans, and our hominid relations, are fascinated by their hands and always have been. We know this because our ancestors left evidence of their handy wonder behind for us to find.
The oldest known cave painting is a red hand stencil from the Maltravieso cave in Caceres, Spain. A “stencil” was made by placing the hand on the rock and spreading pigment around the edge of the hand. Publishing their findings in the journal Quaternary Geochronology researchers have dated this Maltravieso hand to 64,000 years ago and believe that it was made by a Neanderthal. Other caves in places like Peche Merle in southwestern France and El Castillo in northern Spain contain human hand stencils that date to around 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. For tens of thousands of years, humans and our cousins have been interested enough in our hands to want to represent them but, in fact, the history of our fascination goes back even further.
In 2021, researchers from Bournemouth University in the UK found human handprints that appear to have been deliberately made in travertine (freshwater limestone) on the high plateau of Tibet. Travertine is deposited from natural waters and when soft it takes an impression but then hardens to form rock. These researchers found five handprints and five footprints that appear to have been deliberately placed. Radiometric dating placed the deposit as dating to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago. In the intervening 200,000 years, humans have not only painted their hands but have crafted exquisite forms of art from all manner of materials into the shape of hands, such as the 2000-year-old hand with delicately long fingers that was carved from mica and found in southern Ohio as part of the Hopewell Mound Group in the 1920s.
It is not surprising that humans have been entranced by their hands. After all, it is the capacity to grip and employ an opposable thumb that has been the basis of many technological advancements that have made us who we are as a species. In many ways, our hands defi ne us but how did we go from being in love with our hands to using them as a form of greeting?
Why wave?
What do you do when you see someone you know in the street? Before you even think about what you may or may not have to say to them, you will raise your hand and, depending on your mood, you might even jiggle it about a bit. Where did this habit of waving hello originate?
One theory is that the gesture of raising your hand may go back to protecting your eyes from the glare of the sun. This protective gesture may also have had sacred overtones as our ancestors looked upward to the sky to pay respect to the “gods”. It is possible that raising the hand in greeting had a quasi “may the gods be with you” element to it.
Another school of thought is that the wave has a later origin, perhaps arising from the military salute. The salute itself may date back to times when Medieval knights would raise their visors to each other before battle as a sign of mutual respect. Other sources suggest that it may date back to Roman times when officials would require people raise open palms to show peaceful intent, although this is by no means proven.
A far more recent saluting origin story suggests that it goes back a few hundred years when raising your hat was considered polite. In this case the salute was the hatless person’s courtesy.
In essence, the origin of the wave is likely bound up in some sort of recurring gesture where the hand was raised to the head, which transformed into a casual and friendly greeting.
Shake it up
Handshaking, of course, is taking it up a notch by bringing your hand together with someone else’s hand, and it has some interesting history of its own.
The earliest depiction of a human handshake occurs in a ninth-century BCE (2900 years ago) relief that shows the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III grasping the hand of a Babylonian ruler to seal an alliance.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Greek poet Homer mentions handshakes several times. Homer is writing a couple of centuries after the Assyrian relief but because he is telling a story, he is able to describe the meaning of the handshake which he said was to display trust and pledge goodwill. The question remains though as to why a handshake should be used to display these things.
A commonly aired theory is that by extending empty right hands, strangers can show that they are not holding weapons and that they are no threat. The up and down motion associated with the handshake has been suggested as a way of removing any knives or weapons that might be hidden up a sleeve. None of this is, or can, be proven but it does have an appealing logic to it. Even if this peace-gesturing origin of the handshake is true, how has it transitioned to become the ubiquitous everyday greeting that it is in the modern Western world?
Before we answer that question, it is worth noting that the handshake does not permeate all societies. In Chinese culture, for instance, the fist and palm salute, where the right hand is made into a fist and held in the palm of the left hand in front of the chest, has been a hand gesture of greeting for at least 3000 years. The “namaste” gesture of holding the palms and fingers of the hands together is another touchless hand-based greeting gesture.
As far as the modern Western handshake goes, it is thought that it may have been popularised by Quakers in the 1600s who saw clasping each other’s hand as a more egalitarian gesture than bowing or lifting a hat. Certainly, by the 1800s, etiquette books were including guidelines for “proper” handshake protocol.
In 1898, the book Manners and Rules of Good Society explained the handshake in some detail: “The hand, instead of being extended straight out, is now offered on a line or parallel with the chest, a trifle higher than the old-fashioned style, and the fingers of the hand are gently shaken, but the palm is not grasped or even touched.”
We are a little more laissez-faire with our handshakes these days, but we would all do well to not take the handshake for granted because it is probably even more than a creation of our culture.
Deep in your DNA
For her book The Handshake: A Gripping History, author Ella Al-Shamahi interviewed primatologist Dr Cat Hobaiter. According to Hobaiter, chimpanzees and bonobos also shake hands. Both species tend to overlap the fingers more than the palms, although overlapping of palms in a good strong handshake has also been observed. Hobaiter says that for both chimpanzees and bonobos, handshakes were linked to positive social interactions and could even mend relationships after fights. Humans separated from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos around seven million years ago, so it is highly likely that handshaking goes back at least that far.
Our fascination with our hands is deeply imprinted in our DNA, it is not merely historic, it is evolutionary. Although the exact form of using our hands in greeting one another waxes and wanes, it seems likely that humans will always off er each other some form of handy hello.
