Palaeontology

Right-handedness found in human ancestor

By T.K. Randall
October 24, 2016 ·  4 comments

Even our ancestors had a dominant hand preference. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Lillyundfreya Some of us are right-handed and some left-handed, but the exact purpose and origins of our tendency to favor one hand over the other has long remained a bit of an enigma to scientists.

Now though, a new study detailing the discovery of right-handedness in a 1.8 million-year-old Homo habilis fossil shows that this mysterious trait has existed for far longer than modern humans.Authored by paleoanthropologist David Frayer from the University of Kansas, the study focused on strange scratch marks on the hominin's fossil teeth. By analyzing the direction of the marks, it was possible to determine that they had been made by an individual who was primarily right-handed.

By conducting an experiment in which volunteers wearing a scratchable mouth guard simulated the process of chewing Palaeolithic foods, the researchers were able to confirm a similarity between the scratches on the Homo habilis teeth and those created by a right-handed modern human.

"This is an exciting paper because it strongly suggests right-handed tool use in early Homo around 1.8 million years ago," said anthropologist Debra Guatelli-Steinberg of Ohio State University.

Source: Popular Mechanics | Comments (4)

Tags: Hand, Humans