Quantcast
ZME Science
  • CoronavirusNEW
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Health & Medicine Mind & Brain

Two million years ago, Homo habilis was right handed

Hand preference is still something we don't understand that well, but at least we've got a better timeframe now.

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
October 24, 2016
in Mind & Brain, News
Get more science news like this...

Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

Hand preference is still something we don’t understand that well, but at least we’ve got a better timeframe now. Humanity’s ancestors might have already been right handed 1.8 million years ago.

Most people prefer to eat with their right hand. Image credits: Alex (Wiki Commons).

Homo habilis is one of the earliest members of the genus Homo, living roughly between 2.1 and 1.5 million years ago. They are the Homo least similar to humans, but most anthropologists believe that the intelligence and social organization of H. habilis were more sophisticated than chimpanzees for example. Now, a new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports proof of right-handedness in the species, a striking similarity to today’s humans.

“This is an exciting paper because it strongly suggests right-handed tool use in early Homo around 1.8 million years ago,” Debra Guatelli-Steinberg, an anthropologist at the Ohio State University, told Christian Science Monitor.

The study, led by David Frayer, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kansas, focused on scratch marks on a Homo habilis teeth fossils. The scrapes on the teeth consistently looked like whatever caused them was dragged from right to left — something you’d expect from an animal with a preferred hand dominance. They analyzed a total of 559 marks on the teeth, finding that 47% of them align in this way, and just 11% align in the opposite way, which would be consistent with left-handedness. They don’t offer any conclusions as to why this happened.

“We think that tells us something further about lateralization of the brain. We already know that Homo habilis had brain lateralization and was more like us than like apes. This extends it to handedness, which is key,” said David Frayer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas, US.

But this isn’t the only possible explanation for this, and not everyone is convinced. Some researchers believe this could be a case of over-interpretation.

“My concern is that they really don’t spend enough time on other explanations for these phenomena, the presence of these scratches and their directionality,” Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University. “It’s a really interesting observation that only time will tell whether that observation has been over-interpreted.”

Hand preference is still only partially explored in the animal kingdom. For instance, recent studies showed that kangaroos and other macropod marsupials have a left-hand preference for everyday tasks in the wild and this was completely unexpected. Meanwhile, our closest relatives – chimps and apes – don’t truly exhibit hand dominance, so it’s not clear when we evolved this way.

Tags: hand dominancehand preferencehomo habilis
Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

Follow ZME on social media

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.