A Long Time...

There is a representation of the age of our planet that goes along the lines of if you take the age of our planet and superimpose 24 hours across it so the birth of the planet happens at 00:00 and the present day being at midnight, modern humans make an appearance around the last couple of seconds of the day.**

Now he you forget about the rest of human evolution and concentrate on just the hands, try to imagine the amount of time over which our modern hands took shape. All those little mutations over thousands upon thousands of years being passed through the generations, slowly turning flippers into the perfectly useful appendages that helped put us right at the top of the earthly food chain.

Now that is a long, long time. Mindbogglingly long in fact. I think that makes our hands pretty special indeed.

**Please don't quote me on that as I couldn't find the example I was after.