Octopuses have long arms and plenty of smarts, but they don’t point. Nor do chimps, gorillas or other apes, at least not in the wild. Humans, on the other hand, are prodigious pointers.

A human experimenter would stand between the buckets and point to the one that had the treat. (The elephants could not see into the buckets, and controls were conducted to ensure that the animals ...

This robot hand closely follows the structure of a human hand. (Credit: Z. Xu and E. Todorov / UW) You’ve got to hand it to the roboticists at the University of Washington: They’ve built a ...

A reader takes a creative detour from the tradition of manicule as pointing hand. Taken from a copy of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum from the fourteenth century. BANC MS UCB 045.

But Bhadra thinks it’s a mistake to overlook how stray dogs respond to human cues. “In India, we have a huge population of stray dogs. They’re not controlled by humans.

These images show the oldest human hand bone ever found. It was discovered in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and is believed to be more than 1.84 million years old. M. Domínguez-Rodrigo ...