Being Left-Handed and Right-Handed
About 90 percent of the world’s population is right-handed and only 10 percent is left-handed. It is exceptionally rare for a true ambidexterity. Most left-handed people develop some mixed-handedness by living in a world where most everyday objects are for right-handed people (Balter, 2009). Balter says “one researcher hot on the trail of these issues is Natalie Uomini, an archeologist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom” (2009). Uomini states that handedness does not mean that one hand is more dominant over the other. She rather says that “both hands have different but equally important manual dexterity whereas the left hand might perform the more mundane but nevertheless crucial role of supporting an object” (Balter, 2009). Most children begin to emerge between the ages of seven and thirteen months and are well-established by age three (Balter, 2009). When figuring out when such consistency arose in humans is not an easy task. In small number of cases, it is possible to detect signs of handedness in early human fossils by the size of the shoulder and arm bones. There is a clear destination as indicated by the deeper bone insertions of the deltoid muscles in his clavicle and the greater length of the ulna (Balter, 2009). Uomini found out that even though hand bias may be hard to detect among early humans, there is clear evidence from the large number of Neandertal skeletons. The Neandertal skeletons that use to be our evolutionary cousins tended to be right-handed. Balter states that “their right arms and shoulders show greater robusticity, possibly from throwing spears as they hunted wild animals” (2009). The technology-dense lifestyle of early humans has required our ancestors to more or less make up their minds about what hands they were going to use to perform complex task. “Moreover, such hand bias could have aided the learning process as humans taught each other tool