A SHOW OF (LeFt) HAnDS

Michelangelo was left-handed. Leonardo da Vinci was, too. And now some less-famous artists have been added to the lefty list: prehistoric painters who made handprints on cave walls.

Scientists have been curious about how many lefties there were long ago. But where cavemen were concerned, there was no way to tell until Charlotte Faurie at the University of Montpellier in France got the bright idea to count the "negative hands" painted onto cave walls.

Tens of thousands of years ago, cave dwellers in France, Spain, and other countries made hundreds of negative handprints by holding one hand against the stone and outlining it with paint blown through a hollow pipe. Faurie and her coworkers reasoned that a left-handed person would be most comfortable holding the pipe in the left hand and outlining the right hand. So they counted all the prints of right hands-23 percent of the total-as having been made by left-handers. When Faurie had students from her university try making "negative hands" on a piece of paper taped to the wall, 23 percent of them made right handprints, too.

Of course, a person who used the left hand to hold the pipe might not use that hand for every task-for instance, less than 10 percent of Faurie's students wrote or threw a ball with their left hands-but when it comes to making handprints, the number of lefties seems to have remained the same since prehistoric times.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Mar 2004
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