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[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

However, when the researchers factored in a large brain and the ratio between the length of arms and legs, humanity’s overwhelming right-handedness no longer stood out as an anomaly. That means those two traits are best at estimating the handedness of earlier human ancestors, the researchers argue.

....

No, it's because the side with the Broca area controls the rights side...

We've known this for decades, I don't know why so many new studies just ignore everything.

The part possession by great apes of a homologue of Broca’s area is puzzling, particularly considering the discrepancy between sophisticated human speech and the primitive vocalizations of great apes. This may be explained by the contribution that gestures have made to the evolution of human language and speech8. In monkeys, the so-called ‘mirror neurons’ in area 44 seem to subserve the imitation of hand grasping and manipulation, and this neural system may have been specialized initially for gestural and later for vocal communication9. In captive great apes, manual gestures are both referential and intentional10,11, and are preferentially produced by the right hand (which is controlled by the left hemisphere). This right-hand bias is consistently greater when gesturing is accompanied by vocalization10.

From an evolutionary standpoint, therefore, asymmetry in area 44 may be associated with the production of gestures accompanied by vocalizations in great apes, an ability that eventually selected for the development of speech systems in modern humans and perhaps generated more cortical folding in the IFG, leading to expansion of Brodmann’s area 45 in the human brain.

Whatever the function of area 44 in great apes, our finding that these species show a human-like asymmetry not only in posterior (such as the planum temporale12,13) but also in frontal regions, indicates that the origin of asymmetry in language-related areas of the human brain should be interpreted in evolutionary terms rather than being confined to the human species.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2043144/

Before spoken language there's hand gestures, and that prioritizes the right hand, because Broca's on the left.

If other hominids favored the right hand it means they were pretty far along the language path.

It's absolutely doesn't under any circumstances, have to do with how fucking long their arms and legs are. That's just correlation.

[-] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

Thank you for the explanation, quite interesting to read!

this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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