Why Is Almost Everyone Right-Handed? The Answer May Lie in How We Learned to Walk
19th May 2026
It is one of the strangest puzzles in human evolution. About 90% of people across every human culture favour their right hand – with no other primate species showing a population-level preference on this scale. Despite decades of research into the brains, genes and development behind handedness, why humans ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed has remained an evolutionary enigma.
Now, new research led by the University of Oxford, published in PLOS Biology, suggests the answer comes down to two defining features of human evolution – walking on two legs, and the dramatic expansion of the human brain.
The study, by Dr Thomas A. Püschel and Rachel M. Hurwitz at Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, with Professor Chris Venditti at the University of Reading, brought together data on 2,025 individuals across 41 species of monkeys and apes. Using Bayesian modelling that accounts for evolutionary relationships between species, the team tested the major existing hypotheses for why handedness evolved: including tool use, diet, habitat, body mass, social organisation, brain size and locomotion.
I suspect that the Hokey-Pokey had something to do with it.