When a piece of skin, muscle, bone, nails, or hair gets removed or damaged, those usually grow back like nothing happened. So, why isn’t it possible for hands, or even something smaller like a finger to regrow? Or would a piece of meat just regrow there instead of something useful?
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The human body has very limited regrowth potential. It can fix itself to some extent, but only if the injury is at a very small scale and made up of undifferentiated cells (the liver is an exception as it has limited regeneration, the only organ in the body with that ability). So we can fix tiny skin injuries, muscle tears and our bones are fairly good at growing together.
However, if it’s bigger or more complicated than that it’s replaced with scar tissue. We can’t grow new bones, we can’t grow new muscles, we can’t fix large muscle tears or large cuts in the skin (they’re just glued together with scar tissue).
The animals that CAN regenerate limbs (like salamanders, catfish or crustaceans like lobsters and crabs) grow a small blob of cells called a blastema from which they can then sort of replicate the whole limb-growing process. Human’s don’t have that ability.
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