How many fingers does a human hand have

At the risk of sounding high: when was the last time you really looked at your hands? Whoa, dude. We use them every single day for countless tasks, yet they often slip our minds. So why are they the way they are? One of the basic facts about our hands is that they each possess four fingers and a thumb: five digits in total. But why not four, or six? In fact, the ancestor of all modern tetrapods — mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds — had five digits on each of its four limbs back in the Devonian period, to million years ago.

Even bats and whales have the bony remnants of five digits in their wings and flippers, respectively, even though they no longer have need for proper hands.

The ligaments are fibrous tissues that help bind together the joints in the hand. The sheaths are tubular structures that surround part of the fingers. The tendons connect muscles in the arm or hand to the bone to allow movement. In addition, there are arteries, veins and nerves within the hand that provide blood flow and sensation to the hand and fingers.

Health Home Treatments, Tests and Therapies. There are 3 major types of bones in the hand itself, including: Phalanges. The Radius is positioned on the thumb side of the wrist, and the ulna on the little finger side. They form the wrist joint with the carpal bones.

Altogether there are 8 carpal bone which are arranged in two rows, proximal and distal. The scaphoid bone crosses both rows as it is the largest carpal bone. The scaphoid and the lunate are the two bones which actually articulate with the radius and ulna to form the wrist joint. The human hand consists of a broad palm metacarpus with 5 digits, attached to the forearm by a joint called the wrist carpus. The four fingers on the hand are used for the outermost performance; these four digits can be folded over the palm which allows the grasping of objects.

Each finger, starting with the one closest to the thumb, has a colloquial name to distinguish it from the others. The human hand has 27 bones: the carpals or wrist accounts for 8; the metacarpals or palm contains five; the remaining fourteen are digital bones; fingers and thumb.

The palm has five bones known as metacarpal bones, one to each of the 5 digits.