Gorillas right-handedness gives new clues to human language development

A new study that has identified a right-handed dominance in gorillas may also reveal how tool use led to language development in humans. Psychologist Dr Gillian Forrester, a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex, has been studying a family of gorillas at Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent. Using a specially developed coding system for analysis, she and her team identified which hand gorillas used when doing activities such as: using objects and eating or preparing food (described as 'inanimate targets), and which hand they used for social interactions, such as: scratching their head, patting their friend on the back or mothering ('animate targets'). They found the gorillas were more likely to use their right hands for inanimate targets and either hand with equal frequency - for social interaction. In the human population, 90 per cent are right-handed - and 95 per cent of these right-handers have language centres in the left hemisphere of the brain. Dr Forrester's study suggests a direct link between the area of the brain used for manipulating inanimate objects and its specialisation for language skills. She says: 'It is thought that humans exhibit extreme population right-handedness as a sign of our left hemisphere language centers.