Changing hands
A survey of primates shows that humans’ extreme preference for right-handedness cannot be easily explained.
About 90% of humans are right-handed. While it is known that handedness is caused by certain brain regions that are specialized in one of the two hemispheres, it is not clear how this evolved or why right-handedness dominates. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this extreme preference, including the use of tools, the larger size of the human brain, and the fact that humans live primarily on the ground.
Many researchers have regarded the extreme population-wide preference for using the right hand as being uniquely human. However, handedness had not been studied in a standardized manner across a wide range of primates. To fill this gap in our knowledge and understand how handedness may have evolved in monkeys and apes, Caspar et al. used existing data and new experimental observations to create a large dataset of hand preference.
This dataset illustrates how approximately 1800 primates across 38 species retrieve mashed food from a tube (or pieces of paper in the case of humans). Similar to humans, some species of monkey only had small proportions of ambidextrous individuals. However, no species had an extreme preference for using one specific hand the way humans do. Interestingly, Caspar et al. found that the presence of tool use as well as brain size were not associated with the degree of handedness in species. However, ground-living primates tended to show weaker individual preferences for a specific hand than tree-living species, with humans being a notable exception to the trend.
These findings confirm that humans do exhibit exceptional right-handedness, being unique among primates. While the results cannot explain the cause of this behaviour, they do help to rule out some of the theories that aim to explain how this preference evolved. This will be of interest to researchers studying the origins of human behaviour as well as the emergence of asymmetries in the brain.
Originally published at https://elifesciences.org/digests/77875.
