Perhaps evolution's most wondrous manifestation is visible in the unparalleled elegance and versatility in the design of the human hand. The miracle of the hand-brain connection, a development that probably began about three or four million years ago, lies at the existential core of what it means to be human that is, to have developed as tool makers and language users.
Yet writing, a phenomenon of only the past 5,000 years, was a latecomer in human development. It required representational capacity and the dawning idea that a tool in hand could preserve our thoughts and share them across time and space.
The story of Helen Keller, rendered blind and deaf from a fever as a toddler, is a poignant testimony to the human capacity to find meaning through the hands and through language.
