Why We Can Do It...

Why we can make art. First of all, almost too obvious to point out, the opposable thumb and our bipedal structure, freeing up our hands from the necessity of supporting ourselves as we move across the terrain. This we have in common with our great ape cousins, the gorillas and the chimpanzees, but their hip structures only allow for the occasional bits of walking; most of the time they are on all fours. Additionally there is both a power grip and a precision grip, which is evidenced in our handedness. This we have in common with the primates, even to the lemurs, who are predominantly left-handed, thus they hold on to tree branches with their rights and finesse with their lefts. This precision grip is what allows us to make great detail in drawing.

Then there is eye-hand coordination, which we hold in common with all tree-dwelling primates, coupled with complex feedback systems in our brains, skilled in pattern recognition. Our ability to see color and judge distance is a tree-dwelling primate characteristic, we are quite color conscious, while poor distance judging capabilities would be fatal to animals living in trees.

But none of this is yet enough, as these traits are common to all great apes. What is even more specific to us is a high degree of flexible limb structure in those limbs not required for locomotion. Yes, the chimps and gorillas can grasp quite nicely with their opposable thumbs, but not with much fine-tuning. We have limb flexibility in our upper extremities, our torsos, can rotate our upper bodies sideways and forwards, we have full rotation of our arms, and we can turn our hands over due to being able to rotate the radius over the ulna. [pp. 21—24, The Artistic Animal: An Inquiry into the Biological Roots of Art, Alexander Alland, Jr., 1977, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York]

But this is only the beginning, there is the general mammalian necessity of play and exploratory behavior. This is where I will leave off with this post. I'll keep thinking about the big things.