>Humans sat conspicuously outside the pattern that explained every other primate, but ... once you account for upright walking and a large brain, humans stop looking like an evolutionary anomaly.

>Using the same models, the team was also able to estimate likely handedness in extinct human ancestors. The picture that emerges is a gradient [from less handedness to more as time goes on]

"we explored the data until we found a statistical anomaly and it implies X" may be interesting[1], but there are TONS of those that are NOT true. is there supporting evidence for this, or is it just "hey this math says maybe"? it sounds more like the latter (as it quite literally seems like they're claiming roughly "big arm + big brain = big handedness", both in this site and in the paper itself), in which case they might also be interested in this study that pirates keep the global temperature down: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-f...

1: from skimming the methodology in the paper, I honestly think this may be a fair characterization. it sounds like they combined data columns until one combo came up as P>0.95 and didn't have counter-evidence and said "that means it's probably true". but also some (all?) of that data may have been generated by models they created based on real ape data (I think?), which just sounds even more sus.