The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits

Author:Rik Smits [Smits, Rik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781861899743
Google: Qch8RBPjuSUC
Amazon: B006C3WMB4
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2011-10-15T17:09:08+00:00

24

Thwacking and Hurling

That heredity must be bound up in one way or another with the origin and continued existence of our one-handedness is undeniable. However, we still have no idea what the nature of its involvement might be, or why right-handedness ultimately became the norm, let alone an explanation as to where all this left-handedness keeps coming from.

We don’t even know for certain how long ago right- and left-handedness arose, nor when they settled into the lopsided ratio of nine to one, even though there are a number of indications that the distribution we see today goes back a very long way. Among cave paintings such as those at Altamira, Lascaux and Pech Merle, works of art up to 25,000 years old, we find a large number of handprints. Some are positive, made by first pressing the hand into ochre or some other dyestuff and then against the wall, like a stamp. Most marks of this type are of the right hand. Others are negative, drawn with a piece of charcoal around a hand laid flat against the wall, or by blowing powdered paint across it. These negative prints are mostly of a left hand, suggesting that the right hand drew around the left or served as a platform from which to blow the paint powder at it.

Further clues come from stone tools, which are far older. Many archaeologists claim, based on their shapes and the location of marks of wear and tear, that the people who made these tools an estimated 200,000 years ago included roughly the same proportions of right- and left-handed individuals as we see today. Not all archaeologists agree on this, incidentally.

Evidence going back much further still is provided by the baboon skulls that have been found in the vicinity of the remains of our presumed distant relative Australopithecus africanus. We’re now talking about some two to three million years ago. Although he was small of stature, africanus could successfully hunt baboons because he knew how to use a large bone or sturdy stick as a club. Most of the baboon skulls he discarded have a hole smashed in them with a blunt instrument of some kind, usually on the left side, as if the unfortunate creature was clubbed to death by a right-handed primate. None of this amounts to solid proof, but at the very least there’s no evidence that modern man is any different from his ancestors as far as hand preference is concerned.

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