Personal experience suggests that if you put human males beside a body of water with a supply of stones to hand, they will soon start throwing them into the water. What drives them to do this, and is the same true of human females? Is this unique to humans, or has it been observed in other primates? What purpose can it possibly serve?
(Continued)
• As a former baseball player, the mechanics of throwing has always interested me. It is one of the few skills – along with endurance running and extraordinary manual dexterity – in which humans exceed all other mammals. Only apes and some monkeys can throw at all, with humans throwing far harder, faster, farther and more accurately than anything else.
This is because we use leg thrust and the rotation and torsion of our bodies, only possible with an upright posture. We also have a modified shoulder joint, giving greater mobility compared with other apes. All this can more than double the power of a throw.
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This means humans can throw objects well over 100 metres and at more than 160 kilometres per hour. It seems likely that this was crucial in our evolution. For tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years, the Homo genus hunted and fought by throwing things, having the ability to cause damage at a distance. Fine-tuning this skill may even have led to Homo sapiens gaining ascendancy over Neanderthals because they mainly thrust with spears, while we threw them.
So evolution may have built throwing into our genes, which may also explain the urge to throw stones into water. I have it.
Stuart Leslie, Dorrigo, New South Wales, Australia
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