Neandertals had Right Handed Teeth

Ancient Teeth Show Neanderthals Were Righties

Right-handedness reaches back a half million years in the human evolutionary family, at least if scratched-up fossil teeth have anything to say about it.
Stone-tool scratches on the front teeth of Neanderthals and their presumed European ancestors occur at angles denoting right-handedness in most of these Stone Age hominids, just as in human populations today, say anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and his colleagues...

...Experiments conducted by the Spanish team indicate that when using a stone tool to cut a piece of meat by biting down on one end and holding the other end taut, right-handers make accidental scratches that angle in a consistent direction. Similarly, left-handers make scratches angled in the opposite direction.

Magnified images of front teeth from 17 European Neanderthals that lived between 130,000 and 30,000 years ago revealed scratches consistent with right-handedness in 15 cases and left-handedness in two cases. Comparable scratch data from front teeth of 12 Neanderthal ancestors, previously obtained by Marina Lozano of Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain and her colleagues, denoted right-handedness in each individual.

OK, this seems like a clever, but reasonable deduction.

Scientists have linked prevalent right-handedness in human populations to a left-brain hemisphere that controls right-sided body movements and enables critical language functions. Given the new tooth evidence, populations of largely right-handed Neanderthals and their predecessors must have possessed a gift for gab, Frayer’s team proposes in a paper published online April 14 in Laterality. “Findings so far suggest that most European hominids were right-handed by at least 500,000 years ago,” Frayer says. “A capacity for language appears to have ancient, not recent, roots.”

Right Handed Neandertal?

This, however, seems like a stretch.  A left-right distinction in the brain appears to be a long time evolutionary feature in vertebrates, according to a July  2009 article in Scientific American by MacNeilage, Rogers and Vallortigara, that just happens to be sitting around in my bathroom.  Apparently, the brain hemispheres early on specialized, with the left side focusing on local conditions and tasks, while the right hemisphere works on wide scale conditions.  Many animals (toads, fish, birds, whales) show a behavioral difference between the right and left sides.  I have grave doubts that handedness has anything to do with the capacity for speech.

So what do the Cave Babes say?

Left Handed Hominids Attacks Modern Girl

Left Handed Neandertal takes bride?

Looks like they could go either way.