Leonardo Carneiro de Almeida / Getty Our fingertips have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to touch – and now it looks like that sensitivity might be largely confined to the ridges of our fingerprints. “They really help us get very detailed information about what we touch,” says Ewa Jarocka at Umeå University in Sweden. Advertisement Scientists have suspected that our circular, winding fingerprints might have evolved to improve our ability to grip objects by creating better friction, says Jarocka. But she says others have suggested they might contribute to our “very refined sense of touch”. Because current models can’t explain the high levels of sensitivity people have shown in past scientific studies, Jarocka and her colleagues decided to investigate.