Waving and handshakes feel automatic, but they reveal fascinating insights into human behaviour 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