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http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13626058
By Richard Ingham in Paris
Thursday, 09 December , 2004, 10:03
Why have left-handed people survived? That has long puzzled anthropologists, for lefties face worse disadvantages in life other than struggling with tin openers, guitars, scissors and golf clubs designed for the right-handed majority.
Statistical evidence links several auto-immune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis, with lefthandedness. Under Darwin's principles of evolution, genes that hamper survival of the species should get weeded out.
So it is a small mystery as to why the lefthanded have not gone the way of the dinosaurs. French anthropologists believe they have the answer: being a left-handed, far from a disadvantage, is an evolutionary boon.
Their theory is that left-handers survived -- and in some cultures thrived -- because they were better at fighting, having a built-in advantage in combat with a right-handed opponent.
Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier in southern France, compared the number of left-handed people with the number of homicides in eight traditional societies where the weapon was a knife or a machete.
They analysed data from eight societies: the machete-wielding Kreyol people of Dominica; the Ntumu people of Cameroon; the Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso; the Baka people in Gabon; the Eipo people of Irian Jaya; and Inuit people in Alaska, Greenland and Canada; the Jiimi of Papua New Guinea; and the Yanomamo of Venezuela.
The societies which had the most killings had the most left-handed people, they found. At the most peaceful end of the scale, the Dioula had a homicide rate of only one hundredth of a death per 1,000 people per year, while left-handers were only three percent of the population.
At the other end of the scale, the Yanomamo had four homicides per 1,000 inhabitants per year, while left-handers accounted for a huge 22.6 percent of their population.
Faurie and Raymond do not say that to be lefthanded is a source of violence and they stress that violence can also have a range of complex causes. What the data does imply is that the genes for left-handers have survived because, quite literally, in distant past, they helped their owners survive in the human jungle.
"This result strongly supports the fighting hypothesis," the pair say. "More generally, it points to the importance of violence in understanding the evolution of hand."
In traditional societies, individual combat has important consequences. The winner becomes the alpha male, gaining in social status and becoming an attractive mating prospect.
The idea behind their theory -- published on Wednesday in Proceedings B of the Royal Society, Britain's de-facto Academy of Science -- comes from sport, where the southpaw technique often gets the better of confused right-handers.
"Left-handers have an advantage in sports involving dual confrontations, such as fencing, tennis and baseball (pitchers against batters) but not in non-interactive sports such as gymnastics," the study says.
The research was tested only on traditional societies where there was a likelier risk of one-on-one combat, rather than in Westernised societies. In industrialised cultures, the theoretical advantage enjoyed by left-handers would be cancelled out by long-range weapons such as the gun.
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13626058
By Richard Ingham in Paris
Thursday, 09 December , 2004, 10:03
Why have left-handed people survived? That has long puzzled anthropologists, for lefties face worse disadvantages in life other than struggling with tin openers, guitars, scissors and golf clubs designed for the right-handed majority.
Statistical evidence links several auto-immune diseases, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis, with lefthandedness. Under Darwin's principles of evolution, genes that hamper survival of the species should get weeded out.
So it is a small mystery as to why the lefthanded have not gone the way of the dinosaurs. French anthropologists believe they have the answer: being a left-handed, far from a disadvantage, is an evolutionary boon.
Their theory is that left-handers survived -- and in some cultures thrived -- because they were better at fighting, having a built-in advantage in combat with a right-handed opponent.
Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier in southern France, compared the number of left-handed people with the number of homicides in eight traditional societies where the weapon was a knife or a machete.
They analysed data from eight societies: the machete-wielding Kreyol people of Dominica; the Ntumu people of Cameroon; the Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso; the Baka people in Gabon; the Eipo people of Irian Jaya; and Inuit people in Alaska, Greenland and Canada; the Jiimi of Papua New Guinea; and the Yanomamo of Venezuela.
The societies which had the most killings had the most left-handed people, they found. At the most peaceful end of the scale, the Dioula had a homicide rate of only one hundredth of a death per 1,000 people per year, while left-handers were only three percent of the population.
At the other end of the scale, the Yanomamo had four homicides per 1,000 inhabitants per year, while left-handers accounted for a huge 22.6 percent of their population.
Faurie and Raymond do not say that to be lefthanded is a source of violence and they stress that violence can also have a range of complex causes. What the data does imply is that the genes for left-handers have survived because, quite literally, in distant past, they helped their owners survive in the human jungle.
"This result strongly supports the fighting hypothesis," the pair say. "More generally, it points to the importance of violence in understanding the evolution of hand."
In traditional societies, individual combat has important consequences. The winner becomes the alpha male, gaining in social status and becoming an attractive mating prospect.
The idea behind their theory -- published on Wednesday in Proceedings B of the Royal Society, Britain's de-facto Academy of Science -- comes from sport, where the southpaw technique often gets the better of confused right-handers.
"Left-handers have an advantage in sports involving dual confrontations, such as fencing, tennis and baseball (pitchers against batters) but not in non-interactive sports such as gymnastics," the study says.
The research was tested only on traditional societies where there was a likelier risk of one-on-one combat, rather than in Westernised societies. In industrialised cultures, the theoretical advantage enjoyed by left-handers would be cancelled out by long-range weapons such as the gun.
