left handed (Page 2)

It’s no use trying to change?new research shows you wereleft-handed when you were a 10-week-old fetus in yourmother’s womb.

Laura Spinney writes in New Scientist that the hand youfavor as a fetus is the hand you’ll favor for the rest ofyour life. Peter Hepper studied ultrasound scans of 1,000fetuses and found that nine out of 10 of them preferred tosuck their right thumbs. He later found that the samechildren, when older, were all right-handed, while the leftthumb-suckers were left-handed.

“There is no evidence that the brain has any control overthese movements at this stage,” says Hepper. He thinks thepreference for one side of the body may be because that sidedevelops slightly faster.
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People aren’t the only ones who are left or right handed. Walruses, for instance, prefer to use their right flipper to search for clams, and the bones in their right limbs are longer than the ones in their left. Handedness has even been found in crows that use the right side of their beaks to make tools to catch insects. Humpback whales use either the right or left side of their jaw to catch fish, and seals prefer one flipper to beat eels out of the sand.
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