Accueil - Entertainment - Prehistoric left-handedness?
Date : 30 Apr 2025Categories : EntertainmentHistoryScienceUnusual
Prehistoric left-handedness… What’s next? There are very few witnesses who can tell us whether there were left-handed people in prehistoric times, and Michel Drucker was not available for an interview.
The easy way would have been to analyse the cave paintings and engravings left by our ancestors. As you can imagine, a number of researchers, historians and archaeologists have done just that! It has to be said that there are several left hands on one side, and several right hands on the other. Yes, our prehistorians already had two hands. Incredible!
But no, of course, we’re not stopping there.
In fact, some prehistorians ‘simply’ used dyes in which they dipped their hand, usually their right hand, and then applied it to the cave wall. Nothing could be simpler. Other imprints are certainly support marks, for example in loose soil that has subsequently hardened. The third technique could be likened to a kind of stencil: you put your left or right thumb on the wall and spray the dye on to your hand using a kind of straw. The hand is then removed so that it can be used for something else, leaving only a ghostly trace.
This is where our archaeologists, researchers and historians like Marc Groenen come in: some caves are covered in handprints, so we can count them and see if there are more left-handed people than right-handed, depending on the technique. From this we can deduce that around 75% of paleo people were right-handed, leaving a good 25% left-handed, which is more than the current population of left-handed people.
Well, because nobody bothered them back then. We even think that they may have been less lateralised than we are today and that they used both hands more often, with a certain ambidexterity.
If we go back even further in time, we realise that left-handed people already existed 1.8 million years ago, whereas researchers thought that laterality began around 500,000 years ago. This time it’s the research carried out by David W. Frayer that puts us on the trail. David W. Frayer, Professor Emeritus of Biological Anthropology at the University of Kansas, and his team studied skull fossils and tools. He realised that Mr and Mrs Prehis used stone tools to clean their teeth and that these left marks – Mac Lesggy had not yet promoted the electric toothbrush to them. These marks of wear and tear, of blows to the teeth left by a sort of primitive toothpick, were made in 90% of cases by a right-handed person.
As we know that the left side of the human brain manages language and the right side the body, this early laterality would allow us to deduce that it probably has something to do with the acquisition of language. According to Frayer: ‘Right-handedness, cortical reorganisation and language aptitude are crucial elements in the emergence of our gender’. There may have been Leonardo da Vinci among prehistoric artists – research is on the way!