Why are most humans right-handed? The answer may lie in how we learned to walk

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-05-15-why-is-almost-everyone-right-handed-the-answer-may-lie-in-how-we-learned-to-walk

18•gmays•2h ago

Comments

raggi•56m ago

Why are, Oxford.

Freak_NL•53m ago

'Everyone' is treated as singular (aside from 'everyone are' sounding completely wrong).

3form•7m ago

I think that's the case for all the "every <noun>". "Every human is a person", for example. This would make sense, to put it in programming terms - the verb applies to an element in an array of people, not the array itself (which would be plural): for every single human, that human is a person.

darenr•50m ago

No, grammatically "everyone" is an indefinite pronoun. a single collective unit.

cwnyth•50m ago

Confidently incorrect.

stackghost•47m ago

Is that a British thing? Nobody in North America uses "everyone are"

exe34•45m ago

It's not.

shagie•14m ago

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/Everybody-Has-or...

> The words everybody and everyone are pronouns that describe a group of people, but grammatically they are singular. The last part of each word is a singular noun: body and one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica

> Though published in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has for the most part maintained British English spelling.

krater23•47m ago

Didn't I understood the text or is the 'why' not really part of it? I expected more than a vague 'because it slightly existed and then hands are free to do things and brains got bigger'. I miss the point.

stackghost•43m ago

Actual study here: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

My take is that when they added extra factors to the Bayesian model, the plot was such that humans were no longer outliers.

Whether or not that's scientifically rigorous, or even interesting, I leave to others to determine.

Freak_NL•45m ago

So why are us southpaws a rarity? The article and the linked research paper both point to bipedalism and bigger brains as the cause, and the paper vaguely seems to hint at selective pressures leading to the right hand getting favoured by the majority of the population, but why?

The question from the headline is excellent, if only it was actually answered.

scythe•15m ago

Here's my five minute lunchtime hypothesis: it's because the heart is on the left. As human behavior demanded increasing precision from the hands, being a little farther from the heartbeat was a slight advantage.

gpm•9m ago

If this was the case wouldn't it be easier to measure the pulse in peoples left wrists? Which doesn't seem to be a thing?

yawpitch•6m ago

Here’s my multiple years of anatomy classes response: the heart isn’t on the left. The aorta is, sure, but the vena cava is on the right. Also people with situs inversus (essentially all organs flipped laterally from “normal”) aren’t obviously more prone to left-handedness.

NickC25•19m ago

What does it say for mixed-handed folks like myself (different skillsets per hand - in other words, throw and write with different hands)? What about cross-dominance (different body parts differ on dominant side - in other words, a right-handed person being left-foot dominant)?

I've been told that it's effectively a mental illness if discovered during childhood (as is ambidexterity). Yet I can't help but think that it is not a mental illness, but rather something else.

tejohnso•6m ago

In order to present it as a mental illness there would have to be some kind of negative effect, wouldn't there? These differences you mention don't stand out as harmful or even disadvantageous.

hypnodrones•17m ago

I would be interested in studies into impact of left hemisphere importantce on the right hand usage, possibly the more sophisticated and "logical" usage of our hands pressured it as well.

yawpitch•10m ago

One of many articles out there debunking the pop-psych mythology around brain lateralization: https://themindcompany.com/blog/left-brain-right-brain-myth

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Comments

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