SOME people believe in palm reading or palmistry, hoping it can reveal a person's character, love life and future. But if you give your hand to an anthropologist, he might be able to say something about your past - your very distant past.

Last month, 62-year-old Zhang Haiguo, a Shanghai native, was honored with the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Shanghai Society of Anthropology. He specializes in one field of physical anthropology, dermatoglyphics, the analysis of finger, palm and footprints. In Chinese, it's known as fu wen xu (·????§) or the study of skin lines and marks. Only primates have these marks; in humans they are formed when a fetus is 13 to 14 weeks old.

This year Zhang published his life's work, his magnum opus, "Dermatoglyphics from 56 Chinese Ethnic Groups," the first such survey of all China's ethnic groups. The book contains more than 300,000 Chinese characters; the accompanying disc contains 600,000. It identifies the print characteristics of each group and traces migratory routes.

The work is the result of field and lab work with his team over 30 years. He surveyed 68,000 Chinese in all ethnic groups and identified around 150 key samples.

Among his findings: Tibetans' fingerprints are more closely related to those of groups in the far north of China than in the southern Himalayan region of India, indicating that Tibetans migrated from the north. Likewise, the prints of the indigenous Gaoshan people in Taiwan are more like those of groups in northern China than those in the South Pacific islands, which some experts speculate was their origin.

"Dermatoglyphics can't forge or lie, there's no personal opinion involved, and it's the best and natural evidence," Zhang told Shanghai Daily in an interview in his office at Fudan University where he is a part-time lecturer.

The word dermatoglyphics comes from two Greek words, derma meaning skin and glyph meaning carve. It refers to the friction ridge formations on all parts of the fingers, palms, and soles of the feet, and to the analysis of these lines and patterns. It takes a computer, lots of math and sophisticated equipment.

The frequencies of the patterns whorls, loops and arches are calculated for each fingers of both right and left hands and of both sexes.

Over three decades, Zhang and his team have traveled throughout China, armed with ink pad, paper and special magnifiers, often roughing it to get the distinctive prints of the country's distinctive ethnic groups. They not only have distinctive group DNA but also distinctive patterns and frequencies of whorls, loops and arches on their fingers, hands and feet. Within groups, each individual's prints are distinctive, as almost everyone knows from watching TV police and crime scene procedurals involving forensics.

Back in the lab, Zhang does the real work involving complicated measurements and calculations. Prints are magnified on big screens. The frequencies of whorls, loops and arches, even the distance between ridges, are calculated for each part of the finger of right and left hands for both men and women. That's just the beginning.

"These prints are an important genetic inheritance marking that's directly visible to the eye. You can see the differences between groups. It's fundamental work of great significance" in the study of anthropology and human history, Zhang said.

These lines and patterns do not change dramatically in an ethnic group over hundreds or thousands of years, depending on migration and intermarriage. In this sense, the analysis of prints can tell people about their distant origins.

Zhang became interested in anthropology as a bridge between social science and natural science.

Zhang was born and reared in Shanghai. His grandfather owned a pawn shop in Chenghuang Temple around 1950, and his father ran a leather factory. The family was well off and Zhang graduated from middle school at the age of 16.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), his father was denounced as a capitalist. The family lost the factory and their livelihood. Along with other urban youth, Zhang was sent off to the countryside on Chongming Island, doing manual labor and learning from farmers. He was recommended for university later.

He was admitted to Fudan University, studying anthropology and beginning his life's journey seeking answers about where we came from.

"The more you research in the human sciences, the more questions are waiting to be solved, and there's never enough time," Zhang said. "This knowledge is abstruse. It's not just looking at the prints on your hand, there's more behind it."

After graduating in 1977, Zhang taught research genetics at what is now the Medical School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. That's where he did most of his research.

"Field work may sound very romantic, but it's just working outdoors with a lot of anthropological knowledge and skills," Zhang said. "It makes a total difference if you have studied it or not."

Zhang and his colleagues often roughed it as they traveled to remote areas seeking the "purest" ethic groups that had lived in relative isolation with little intermarriage over the years.

"We lived in stables and had to figure out what to do when there was nothing to eat and no place to sleep," he recalled. "We ate a lot whenever we could, because you never knew when or where you would get the next meal."

Zhang has been to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region five times, to Yunnan Province five times, to Qinghai Province three times. He visited the Tibet Autonomous Region once and Taiwan several times. And, of course, the rest of China.

"Many unexpected things happened when we worked out there," he said.

When Zhang retired from Jiao Tong University in May 2010, Fudan University invited him to be a professor with flexible hours.

Before he reached age 60, Zhang collected postage stamps, but he stopped after he started teaching at Fudan. He didn't want to be distracted.

"I devoted all my energy to this position and wanted to do my best, taking dermatoglyphics to another level," he said. "You can always accomplish something when you climb slowly and patiently."

In class, he gets many questions.

"My thinking and research is pushed forward by their questions, such as why dermatoglyphics only applies to primates, not other animals," Zhang said.

"When you pledge to do something, you must persist and cannot be careless, no matter what."

Zhang has written more than 70 research articles, 100 popular science essays, and six books.

He scoffs at palmists and fortune telling, saying it's all worthless and unscientific.

"I have perhaps seen more palms than most fortune tellers. But I don't think someone can tell others' fortune through palms," he said earlier this year in an interview. "Someone invited me to join fortune telling 20 years ago, but I refused."