Recently smashed my finger and lost the nail and it got me wondering what is the biological / mechanical / etc function / reason for fingernails? Sure it would be harder to grip little things, but is there a structural reason why our digits need these things?
EDIT: Follow up question. What is different about the skin underneath your nail that makes it so painful when initially exposed to air?
In: 273
They’re surprisingly useful little tools, and before we invented knives and screwdrivers they were all we had. They were also a hell of a lot harder back then and could fuck some stuff up. Much more effective than poking at things with a fleshy little meat stick.
Partly to remove parasites. It’s much easier to grip a tick or flea with nails, and removing ticks and fleas from others was likely a large part of prehuman ancestor’s social groups, something that drove human intelligence development.
We also evolved from things with claws for digging and climbing like our distant juramaia ancestors, and while our ‘claws’ have become less impressive they remain useful.
Our thin, flat rather then curved nails support nimble uses of our fingertips, something other people have explained well. Humans are specialized tool builders, and nails help us build tools.
One of the main things about evolution that is commonly misunderstood is that it doesn’t have a “why”. It’s just a long list of accidents that worked.
After those accidents do work, we can try to understand what was successful about them, but there was no why to it.
I have a friend who had his big toenails removed (really bad ingrowns) in his 20s and basically said he had to re-learn to walk. Without them it screwed up his sense of balance. (Try balancing on one foot barefooted to get an idea of how much you rely on sensory feedback from your feet and toes for balance)
AH I know this one !
That’s for feedback. Try touching anything, and focus on your nail. You’ll feel that, while the contact does happen with the skin, the pressure is actually between your finger and your nail. This pressure allows you to measure strength. It makes your fingers more sensible for prehensibility, and eases your balance by making your feet more reliable thanks to distributed pressure.
Fingernails are incredibly useful. I think they are underrated in terms of thinking of the things we could do with them and how they have helped us to create advanced machinery. They help us with so many intricate tasks that we would regular not be capable of doing. I always see alien movies where some aliens have giant fingers and I’m like there’s no way they could make an advanced civilization with those stubby ass fingers.
We don’t just feel on our finger tips, we feel based on the pressure of our skin being pressed against our nail. So without finger nails, we wouldn’t be able to feel how well we are grabbing items. Especially if we want to delicately pick them up.
Just tap your fingers together and you will notice how you actually feel pressure against your fingernail.
The rigidity of it would be different without the nail. Try grabbing something with a sponge. It won’t work usually because the sponge flexes backwards, even with something supporting the middle.
Hands, but why toes? I’m always telling to pick stuff up with my toes for giggles, but nope.
Fingernails support the structure of the finger making it easier to handle tiny things like needles and thread. They’re also natural grooming tools, gently scratching wet skin exfoliates it effectively and they work tolerably well in place of a toothbrush if you’re desperate for a cleaning and without one.
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