{"product_id":"histories-of-the-unexpected","title":"Histories of the Unexpected","description":"Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.\n\nHistories of the Unexpected\n\n\nHow Everything has a Story\nBy Sam Willis, James Daybell Atlantic Books LtdCopyright © 2018 Sam Willis \u0026amp; James Daybell\nAll rights reserved.\nISBN: 978-1-78649-412-2\n\n\nContents\nAcknowledgements,\nIntroduction,\n1. The Hand,\n2. Gloves,\n3. Perfume,\n4. The Bubble,\n5. Shadows,\n6. Beards,\n7. Clouds,\n8. Dust,\n9. Clocks,\n10. Needlework,\n11. The Itch,\n12. Holes,\n13. The Bed,\n14. Dreams,\n15. Hair,\n16. The Paper Clip,\n17. Letters,\n18. Boxes,\n19. Courage,\n20. Mountains,\n21. Chimneys,\n22. Tears,\n23. Lions,\n24. Rubbish,\n25. Snow,\n26. Cats,\n27. The Smile,\n28. The Scar,\n29. The Lean,\n30. The Signature,\nSelected Further Reading,\nIllustration Credits,\nIndex,\n\nCHAPTER 1\nTHE HAND\nThe history of the hand is all about ... time travel, medieval magic, cave painting, royal power, intimacy and grief.\n\nKnock, knock ...\nKnock, knock ...\nWhat are your hands doing? Ours are knocking on the door of your brain. They are waking you up. They are starting a conversation. They are starting this conversation – by typing. Yours, presumably, are holding a book or tablet. But how many different ways have you used your hands today? And how many more different ways will you use them before tomorrow? You have presumably got dressed, washed, prepared food, fed yourself, picked up or put down an enormous variety of objects, communicated to yourself by touching or communicated to others by writing, typing or gesturing. Maybe you have shaken hands, waved goodbye, raised your fist in anger or delivered a thumbs-up or 'OK' sign to broker friendship.\nSuch gestures from the past survive in the present day in a number of forms, but perhaps most powerfully in prehistoric art dating from as far back as 40,000 years ago.\n\nCAVE PAINTING\nHand stencils are a common visual form of prehistoric art. They have been discovered across sites in France, Spain, Africa, Australia, Argentina and Borneo (which are thought to be by far the oldest examples c.40,000 years ago). They were created either by blowing or spraying paint made from charcoal or a pigment called red ochre over the hand, thus creating a type of hand shadow – the most common type of images that survive – or by covering the hand in paint to create a print.\nIn our evolutionary past the hand was significant because the opposable thumb, fine motor skills and the manual use of tools was a distinctly human characteristic that distinguished Homo sapiens from animals. Hands had significance in prehistory in other practical ways: digits for counting, or the hand's span as a rough and ready way of measuring; the height of horses was also measured in hands. It is no surprise, then, that hands were one of the commonest forms of visual expression in our most ancient history. The compulsion to create art, moreover, is one of the few but crucial things that define us as human, along with the ability to think and plan for the future and also (and here is the historian writing) the ability to remember and learn from the past. These hand stencils, therefore, are not just part of the history of art but evidence for the evolution of the modern human mind; they are a chapter of the very earliest history of Homo sapiens.\nThe creation of these images is believed to hold some form of magical or ritual significance and we know that, in some locations, the prints would have been extremely uncomfortable for a person to make on their own, and that other prints would have been impossible to make without help. In these single hand prints, therefore, is some of the earliest evidence of human teamwork. In some locations there are so many hand prints in one place that the artwork would have taken both planning and considerable time. They also show a surprising variety of hand shapes, sizes and patterns. Intriguingly, many have been shown with apparently amputated digits. The belief that the images were accurately depicting hands with missing fingers has now been consigned to ","brand":"Atlantic Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40585943908437,"sku":"9781786494122N","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/8e5281f1-d1a5-4f2c-a204-d5e513a0c786.jpg?v=1681894154","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/products\/histories-of-the-unexpected","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}