Chimpanzees Shed New Light on Hand Preference

An anonymous reader writes "'Language skills are associated with the left side of the brain, and many scientists have said early humans developed a preference for their right hands when they acquired speech,' but Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center has a new study that links hand preference to the motor skills area of the brain rather than the language part of the brain. 'That means lefties have probably been around much longer than believed -- at least 5 million years, when scientists say humans and apes branched on the primate family tree. And evolution has purposely kept them.'"

Comments

Re:!tsop dednah tfet tsriF

[mccalli]

HE shouldn't have been using the devil's hand in the first place

You Sinistromanualist, you...

More seriously the, errr, granparent post is referring to this happening to his grandfather. Minus the beating, this was still happening to me when I was at school in the eighties (UK). An English teacher made a concerted effort to force me to be right-handed, and it completely messed up my writing. You can see a clear difference between the schoolbooks I had before her 'teaching', and those I wrote afterwards.

For the worse, of course.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:... evolution has purposely kept them ...

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

There is a advantage of being left-handed - it is the element of surprise when you meet your foe. This obviously works only when the percentage of left-handed individuals is low enough - around 10 - 20 %, IIRC.

I am left-handed and I can say I do take advantage of it. I play volleyball and it always takes some adjusting until the opponent starts to block my left hand instead of my right. Playing squash, opponent often let me play mostly forhand because they don't realise my weak side is the other one.
And quite obviously, this is even true for two left-handed opponents playing against each other. With majority of my opponents being right-handed, I myself am taken bu surprise when I meet left-handed opponent.

Obvously, this advantage is lesser in repeated encounters and lesser when there are more left-handed people around.

Re:Evolution wants to be anthropomorphised?

[kahei]

As a christian, I strongly agree.

It's ridiculous to suppose that God would have created a whole universe and then expected us to restrict our examination of it to a short list of statements.

And in Victorian times, everyone used to think the same way; the business of a scientist(*) was to admire, analyse, and better appreciate God's creation. Then the ****ing Evangelicals came along and it all went straight to heck.

(*)Except Frankenstein.

My Dog's Got a Name and It's Oscar Mayer

[The-Bus]

While helping my girlfriend with her lab on the common Fiddler crab (Uca pugilator) I decided to do some side-research of my own*. I found that approximately 1/3rd of Fiddler crabs in our population (of about 20) were left-handed (in that their left claw was freakin' huge). This would lead credence to an earlier post talking about handedness being a surprise to rivals.

It is interesting to see, however, that the Scientific American article covering the same subject seemed to focus more on the study whose results found similarites in the limbic system asymmetry between primates. The handedness study (which of course waters down easier for the average person) seemed to be second fiddle.

By the way, the actual studies are found here (in 300-500KB PDFs):
Asymmetries in the Hippocampus and Amygdala of Chimpanzees
Handedness in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Is Associated With Asymmetries of the Primary Motor Cortex but Not With Homologous Language Areas

* I had previously determined that the bisque turned out a bit stringy and that scampi was preferred. This, sadly, derailed the other, more "important" research.