alt Hacker News> The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.
What? No. None of that. Even if vines wrapped around a sharp stone were ever common, no one alive today (outside an uncontacted tribe maybe) is "familiar" enough with them to make a difference.
Texturing handles is just an obvious mechanical thing to increase grip that probably gets invented every time someone makes a handle from a smooth material.
But they were familiar enough with vines then leather cord then ribbing and so on.
We of course are not talking about today, we're talking about thousands of years ago, and a whole series of comfortably familiar skeuomorphic transitions. Until by now, knife handles have the obviousness they have through that heritage of iterative familiarity.
Such isn't an opinion, it's researched if you look. (Not that this user would know, of course.)