“Handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon.”15 From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur toward the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the “femaleness of handedness,” Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, much more quickly and decisively than boys.
