The right hand

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Am weary thinking of your task.

But childhood speedily reaches the stage when the privileged hand asserts its prerogative, and assumes its distinctive responsibility. For good or evil, not only does the right hand take precedence in the established formulæ of speech, but the left hand is in many languages the symbol or equivalent of impurity, degradation, malice, and of evil doings.

Looking then on right-handedness as a very noticeable human attribute, and one that enters largely into the daily acts, the exceptional manifestations of skill, and many habits and usages of life: the fact is indisputable that, whether we ascribe its prevalence solely to education, or assign its origin to some organic difference, the delicacy of the sense of touch, and the manipulative skill and mobility of the right hand, in the majority of cases, so far exceeds that of the left that a term borrowed from the former expresses the general idea of dexterity. That education has largely extended the preferential use of the right hand is undoubted. That it has even unduly tended to displace the left hand from the exercise of its manipulative function, I fully believe. But so far as appears, in the preference of one hand for the execution of many special operations, the choice seems, by general consent, without any concerted action, to have been that of the right.

The proofs of the antiquity of this consensus present themselves in ever-increasing amplitude, leading finally to an investigation of traces apparently showing a prevalent dexterity among palæolithic artificers. The paintings and intaglios of ancient Egypt, the sculptures of Nineveh and Babylon, and the later products of Hellenic and Etruscan art, when carefully studied, all yield illustrations of the subject. But the disclosures of archæology in its later co-operation with the researches of the geologist have familiarised us with phases of human history that relegate the builders of the Birs Nimrud, and the sculptors of Nineveh or Thebes, to modern centuries. The handiwork of the palæolithic cave-dwellers and the primitive drift-folk produce to us works of industry and skill, fashioned when art was in its infancy, and metallurgy unknown.

It is unnecessary here to aim at even an approximate estimate of the remoteness of that strange epoch when the cave-dwellers of the Vézère and the northern slopes of the Pyrenees were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the long-extinct carnivora of the caves; and the fossil horse, with the musk-sheep, reindeer, and other Arctic fauna, were objects of the chase among the hunters of the Garonne.

The assignment of the primitive relics of human art to a period when the use of metals was unknown, and man had to furnish his implements and weapons solely from such materials as wood, horn, bone, shell, stone, or flint, has naturally given a novel importance to this class of relics; and we owe to the pen of Dr. John Evans not only an exhaustive review of the ancient implements and weapons of Great Britain, but also, incidentally, of the world’s Stone Age, in nearly all countries and periods. In that work, accordingly, some of the earliest traces of man’s handiwork, as the manipulator and tool-maker, are described. Of those the implements of the River-drift Period are at once the rudest and most primitive in character. They occur in vast numbers among the rolled gravel of the ancient fresh water or river-drifts, of what has received from the included implements the name of the Palæolithic Period; and if they are correctly assumed to represent the sole appliances of the man of the Drift Period, they indicate a singularly rude stage. In reality, however, the large, rude almond and tongue-shaped implements of flint are nearly imperishable; while trimmed flakes, small daggers or arrow-heads, and other delicately fashioned flint implements,—as well as any made of more perishable materials, such as shell, wood, or bone,—must have been fractured in the violence to which the rolled gravels were subjected, or would perish by natural decay.

But the same period is no less definitely illustrated by deposits sealed up through unnumbered centuries under the stalagmitic flooring of limestone caves, or in the deposits of river gravels and silt, filling in many of the caves with red earth and gravel embedding implements closely resembling those of the drift. The ossiferous deposits, moreover, found in some of the oldest caves of England, France, and Belgium, which have disclosed palæolithic tools, include also remains of the mammoth, cave-bear, fossil-horse, hyæna, reindeer, and other animals either wholly extinct, or such as prove by their character the enormous climatic changes referred to. In so far, therefore, as they afford any indication of the antiquity of man, they point to ages so remote that it is unnecessary to investigate the bearings of evidence suggestive of comparative degrees in time. Every new discovery does, indeed, add to our means of determining a relative prehistoric chronology which for some aspects of the inquiry is replete with interest and value. But the subject is referred to now solely in its bearing on the subordinate yet significant question relative to the manipulation of the primitive tool-maker.

Here then, if anywhere, we may hope to find some of the earliest evidences of dexterity, alike in its technical and its popular sense. The primitive Troglodytes of Europe have not only transmitted to us abundant evidence of their industry as tool-makers, but also remarkable illustrations of their imitative art, and of an æsthetic faculty developed into rare excellence under all the disadvantages of the cave-dweller fashioning his own artistic implements in a palæolithic age. In such a stage of social life man was uninfluenced by any necessity for concerted action, and so was free to follow inclination or instinct in the preference for either hand.

CHAPTER IV
PALÆOLITHIC DEXTERITY

Archæology has undertaken novel duties as the handmaid of history. With its aid we have acquired more definite ideas of the men of Western Europe in its pleistocene or quaternary epoch than we possess of the contemporaries of Greece and Rome in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The huge cave-bear, the cave-lion, with their more formidable congener, the sabre-toothed Machairodus latidens, preyed on the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the reindeer, musk-sheep, and other fauna of a semi-arctic climate; and the men of that same epoch, while still ignorant of the very rudiments of metallurgy, fashioned for themselves sufficiently effective weapons to contend successfully with the fiercest of the carnivora, and secure for their own use the spoils of the chase. Palæolithic man made his home in the deserted rock-shelters and caves of the hyæna and cave-bear; and in spite of the privations of a rigorous climate, found leisure not only to fashion his ingenious tools, but to indulge a taste for art, alike in carving and in etching on ivory and stone, to an extent altogether remarkable when the whole attendant circumstances are duly estimated. Specimens of those primitive works of art, including ingenious carvings in bone and ivory, and lances, daggers of deers’ horn, maces and batons carved in bone, and decorated in some cases with artistic skill, have been recovered from the cave-drift, or more securely sealed up in the cave-breccia. The evidences of skill are unmistakable. Within the last thirty years repeated discoveries of such ancient cave-dwellings, and the investigation of their contents, have familiarised us with the workmanship of their primitive artificers. The evidence which these ingenious products furnish in proof of the dexterity of the ancient cave-men, in the more comprehensive sense of that term, is universally recognised; but my attention was first directed to the possible clue which they might furnish to the prevalent use of one or other hand in that remote age, by what on further investigation proved to be an error in the reproduction of the famous drawing of the mammoth on a plate of its own ivory, found in La Madelaine Cave, in the Valley of the Vézère. In M. Louis Figuier’s L’Homme Primitif, for example, which might be assumed as a reliable authority in reference to the illustrative examples of French palæolithic art, the La Madelaine Cave sketch is incorrectly reproduced as a left-hand drawing; that is to say, the mammoth is looking to the right. This is a nearly unerring test of right or left-handedness. The skilled artist can, no doubt, execute a right or left profile at his will. But an unpremeditated profile-drawing, if done by a right-handed draftsman, will be represented looking to the left; as, if it is the work of a left-handed draftsman, it will certainly look to the right.