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05/02/2020

The mystery of the left hand: for the first time, genetics finds clues about manual dominance in humans
How to know if your child is right or left handed: simple tests to check
Nine out of ten people have been right-handed for no less than 10,000 years. We know it from prehistoric tools, cave paintings and cross-cultural studies. Lefties are, although it may not seem like it, an enigma that has intrigued experts for decades.
Above all, because it is something that does not occur in the animal kingdom where traits of this type are distributed more evenly. Now a team of researchers from the University of Oxford has identified a series of genetic variants that may be behind the mystery of the left hand.
The left hand of ... humanity
Pablo Garcia Saldana
The researchers analyzed genetic data, medical reports and brain images of 721 left-handed and 6,685 right-handed people. Thanks to this, they identified four specific genome sites associated with the dominant left hand. Three of them also have a very important role in the development of brain areas related to language.
 And, indeed, when studying these areas in detail, they discovered that they seemed to behave in a more coordinated manner in left-handed than right-handed. These differences, even if they were expected (studies with twins told us that there was something), had not yet been found.
Another very interesting thing about the study is that these genetic variants can explain "moderately" part of the propensity that left-handed people seem to develop in the face of schizophrenia and anorexia nervosa or their lower Parkinson's rate. They are very small figures, but that allow us to clear a mystery that until now we did not know how to solve.
And this work, beyond its concrete results, is the first significant association between specific genetic mutations, brain structure and left-handed population. As Ryan F. Mandelbaum says, we have not found the "left handed gene", but it is not necessary. We are facing a very exciting study because it is very possible that it opens one of the ways that help us understand how all this works with the dominant hand.

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