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Left-handed people have long faced stigma for their unusual trait. Maybe because in many countries the left hand was associated with post-toilet cleaning, or maybe because the Bible appears to favour the right hand over the left, southpaws could often find themselves with hands tied behind their backs to force them to become accustomed to using the right hand at all times.
One theory about how left-handedness came about hypothesised that left-handed people were all originally twins, effectively two halves of a whole. The right-handed twins were assumed to have died early on in pregnancy, leaving only the unusual left-hander to survive.
As bizarre as it may sound, the theory isn’t completely absurd. It’s true that a lot of lefties were indeed one of a set of two originally, however what has since been discovered is that up to one in eight pregnancies start off as twin pregnancies. As less than 1.5% of people is a twin, it appears that the stories of people absorbing their dead twin’s remains and finding them inside tumours years later aren’t as fantastic as you’d think. Often in twin pregnancies, one twin takes significantly more blood, nourishment or womb – sorry, room – than the other, leaving the weaker twin to pass away even before their existence had been registered. From an evolutionary point of view, it’s common sense – embryos in the first stages of development are fragile little things, so Mother Nature may hedge her bets and create two in the hope that at least one will survive. Especially before the advances in maternal medicine that we are lucky enough to have today, twin pregnancies could be high risk for the mother, so the most viable foetus often does away with its sibling and enjoys the full womb service without having to share.
