2. Right and Left - Page 2

before the great glacial epoch had furrowed the
mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and
strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the
forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on
the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless
you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and
instinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?
Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find it
requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves
of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,
again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginary
profile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this
case looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,
whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, with
their right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned to
the left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing so
is a test of their perfect right-handedness.

But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we know
personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew
men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way
indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been
ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and
indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of
bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, be
comparatively difficult.

I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very
clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with
tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a
species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping
to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his
tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts
on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we
ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of
savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man
now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable
for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of
his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to
the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different
in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite
of all