TITLE:
Left Hands or Right Hands? An Artificial Intelligence Method-Based Evidence for Finding Remote Ancient People’s Habits When They Wrote Oracle Words that Were Deracinated 3000 Years Ago
AUTHORS:
Shichao Song, Xun Liang, Zihuan Feng, Yang Xue
KEYWORDS:
Handedness Inference, Ancient Human Behavior, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Shang Dynasty Writing
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Computer and Communications,
Vol.14 No.4,
April
28,
2026
ABSTRACT: Human beings like to ask where we came from and are always curious about how our habits evolved. One of our habits is handedness. It is found that cats and dogs do not differentiate between right- or left-handed forelimbs. But most humans are dextromanual. Did humans originate as dextromanual, or did most people converge to right-handedness as human society developed? To discover the answer, some archaeologists speculated that the ancients were right-handed because they found an ancient tooth fossil from 500,000 years ago in Spain skewed to the right. Is there more evidence? The extinct oracle bone scripts, written by ancient Chinese 3000 years ago, may expose some clues. We use the real images of the genuine rubbings provided by The Oracle Museum of China in our experiments. As it is well known, the power of deep learning networks has surpassed human beings in identifying subtle differences in images. Using the artificial intelligence tool, this paper studies the recognition of real oracle rubbings. Since it is impossible to recognize directly with the naked eye whether these rubbings were written by the left or right hand of ancient Chinese humans, this study has to employ the unsupervised method. We found through exhaustive experiments that the ancient oracle word authors were more likely to be dextromanual.