Humans are the only living hominid that can throw objects accurately & at speed – while some of the other great apes can throw objects, their speed & accuracy is not the best. (In his musing on human evolution, Darwin noted that adaptations allowing this would be at a selective advantage as they would increase hunting effectiveness.) I found it interesting to look at why this is so – in both morphological & evolutionary terms – & because trends in human biological evolution are something year 13 biology students need to know about, I thought I’d write about it here.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://sciblogs.co.nz/bioblog/2021/09/07/trends-in-human-evolution-the-shoulder/