Short question, what events would induce the evolution from hands of 4 fingers and 1 thumb into hands of 2 fingers and 1 thumb like the hands of Yoda in Start wars?Would be 2 thumbs and 1 finger be better?
Or more like this... cause Yoda has some really tiny hands with short fingers
Between it's not necessarily related to humans, but I'm also interested more in wild animals too.
There is a congenital defect called oligodactyly which is when an organism is born with fewer fingers and/or toes than normal. If some advantage to this arrangement were to be found by an organism with this condition, and its offspring were more likely to be born with it than not, then you might get speciation. There is some evidence that oligodactyly can be endemic in humans (the Wadoma people of Zimbabwe are known for ectrodactyly, an extreme form of oligodactyly).
Narrower hands would allow access to food in smaller openings, such as bee hives secreted in trunks or animal burrows, without tool-use. There would be disadvantages to grip strength and object manipulation, however.
Hands as we know they are a primate feature. They evolved these so that they would have better grip in their arboreal environment and this went down the like to human hands. There is no steadfast rule for the amount of digits, after the first land vertebrates had 12 fingers, so saying that your species has 3 isn't a real problem. While an arboreal jungle is the best environment for developing hands, theoretically there are a few more;
