The Right Hand by Daniel Wilson — Read

Archeology has undertaken novel duties as the handmaid of history. With its aid we have acquired more definite ideas of the men of Western Europe in its pleistocene or quaternary epoch than we possess of the contemporaries of Greece and Rome in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The huge cave-bear, the cave-lion, with their more formidable congener, the sabre-toothed _Machairodus latidens_, preyed on the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the reindeer, musk-sheep, and other fauna of a semi-arctic climate; and the men of that same epoch, while still ignorant of the very rudiments of metallurgy, fashioned for themselves sufficiently effective weapons to contend successfully with the fiercest of the carnivora, and secure for their own use the spoils of the chase. Paleolithic man made his home in the deserted rock-shelters and caves of the hyena and cave-bear; and in spite of the privations of a rigorous climate, found leisure not only to fashion his ingenious tools, but to indulge a taste for art, alike in carving and in etching on ivory and stone, to an extent altogether remarkable when the whole attendant circumstances are duly estimated. Specimens of those primitive works of art, including ingenious carvings in bone and ivory, and lances, daggers of deers' horn, maces and batons carved in bone, and decorated in some cases with artistic skill, have been recovered from the cave-drift, or more securely sealed up in the cave-breccia.

The evidences of skill are unmistakable. Within the last thirty years repeated discoveries of such ancient cave-dwellings, and the investigation of their contents, have familiarised us with the workmanship of their primitive artificers. The evidence which these ingenious products furnish in proof of the dexterity of the ancient cave-men, in the more comprehensive sense of that term, is universally recognised; but my attention was first directed to the possible clue which they might furnish to the prevalent use of one or other hand in that remote age, by what on further investigation proved to be an error in the reproduction of the famous drawing of the mammoth on a plate of its own ivory, found in La Madelaine Cave, in the Valley of the Vézère. In M. Louis Figuier's _L'Homme Primitif_, for example, which might be assumed as a reliable authority in reference to the illustrative examples of French paleolithic art, the La Madelaine Cave sketch is incorrectly reproduced as a left-hand drawing; that is to say, the mammoth is looking to the right. This is a nearly unerring test of right or left-handedness. The skilled artist can, no doubt, execute a right or left profile at his will. But an unpremeditated profile-drawing, if done by a right-handed draftsman, will be represented looking to the left; as, if it is the work of a left-handed draftsman, it will certainly look to the right.