A more Leftie World

How would civilization develop if the majority of human beings where left handed instead of right?
This is meant to be a serious Prehistory question.
 
Short of a few grammatical changes (being on the left hand at the table is more important than being on the right, your most important employee is referred to as your left hand man, and stuff like that), and the fact that people are now considered demon-possessed in the middle ages for being right handed, I don't see anything major changing.
 
Physiologically it would make no difference. But there would be so much butterfly effects that history would be entirely different. Only one sperm out of a million gets to fertilize an egg. The smallest change would result in different people being born.
 

JJohnson

Banned
...right handed people might be considered the smart ones? :) Seriously, it'd mean more that just left-handers aren't the outsiders and retrained by their parents, forced to use an unnatural hand to write. I don't see any real difference.
 
IIRC, predominant right-handedness of human population has something to do with chirality (spirali-ness) of some protein molecules in our bodies. This chiraliness is also responsible for us being able to digest most forms of food. So unless we also consider most of the food (and in general biomass) on Earth having left-handed chirality, predominant left-handedness would mean that human diet is much more restricted (diabetes nearly universal, etc.). Bear in mind that this all might be complete bollocks, I'm no biologist.
 
IIRC, predominant right-handedness of human population has something to do with chirality (spirali-ness) of some protein molecules in our bodies. This chiraliness is also responsible for us being able to digest most forms of food. So unless we also consider most of the food (and in general biomass) on Earth having left-handed chirality, predominant left-handedness would mean that human diet is much more restricted (diabetes nearly universal, etc.). Bear in mind that this all might be complete bollocks, I'm no biologist.

Probably bollocks, due to my and others' first hand experience being left-handed and yet still able to eat normally.
The major thing that hasn't been mentioned is the probability of most written languages being written from right to left, so that the left hand doesn't smudge what it just wrote.
Oh and the other major thing is that people will generally use their right brain more. Which doesn't mean anything as far as I am concerned, but apparently there are supposed to be big differences in what the sides of the brain do.
 
Probably bollocks, due to my and others' first hand experience being left-handed and yet still able to eat normally.

I was born left-handed as well, so I am fully aware of that. But a small percentage of humans being left-handed doesn't mean said humans have different chirality of proteins in their bodies, there might be a number of other reasons for the handedness. A majority left-handed population would lend credibility to the suggestion that their proteins and left-handed.

Oh and the other major thing is that people will generally use their right brain more. Which doesn't mean anything as far as I am concerned, but apparently there are supposed to be big differences in what the sides of the brain do.

Well, the right brain is responsible for creativity, while the left brain is responsible for reasoning. There are other things associated with brain sides. So we may have a society where technological/scientific development is slower, but liberal arts flourish.
 
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