In the world today, nine out of ten people are right handed, so it might be a moot point anyway, but why do people prefer their left hand over their right, or one hand over the other at all for that matter? According to LiveScience, it’s probably just the brain trying to be efficient in how it does things. Brains are all divided into two hemispheres, and it’s horribly inefficient to make two parts of the brain do the same thing for one action to happen, and it’s simply a waste of brain power for the brain to work that way. There’s a lot of things in the human brain that are triggered by that same response in the mind (which is to say using two parts of the brain to perform a single task) such as chewing food, where–to grossly oversimplify–the brain has to send a signal from its motor function part to make the jaw move, and simultaneously send a completely separate signal from a similar part to make your mouth fill with saliva, and make your throat swallow. So, back to the original question, what is it?

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So what about the myth that it’s based on what side of your brain you use more? People always say that right brained people are more creative, and left brained people are more logical, but as the common superstition goes, people tend to believe that if someone is “right-brained,” they are typically left handed, and vice versa. The only problem, though, is that there’s no scientific evidence to support this.

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No one really knows why people are left or right handed, and there isn’t much new research out about the age-old riddle of handedness. In fact, most land species actually prefer certain hands, but the main thing to remember about the difference in humans is that while humans have a 90 percent to 10 percent split, all animals that have been experimented with have consistently shown around half and half.

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The most current accepted theory is that it comes down to genetics, and studies show that left-handed people are more likely to produce left-handed offspring, but the theory that I’m proposing today is based on this. The split is based on our human history. It’s been a strong superstition for centuries that left handed people are deformed in their purity. In the Renaissance, people were prosecuted as being related to the devil based on their handedness. In Kenya, they believed that their Holy Men had evil powers that they stored in their left hands, and their Holy Men had to hide their left hands from others.

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So what I propose is that maybe it’s been a conscious choice to take left-handed people out of the gene pool. People have been executed for less, and there are cases of people being prosecuted based on their handedness.