In this study, we coded art painted on rocks located in southern Africa, which was painted with a mixture of ochre, blood, and clay by the San, a Neolithic culture with no written language. These images depict a mixture of humans and animals in a variety of contexts, including (but not limited to) hunts and dances. We calculated a laterality index for the collected available art from each region, finding that although there was variability across regions in the direction of the laterality scores, most regions contained a majority of figures facing rightward. This is in stark contrast with reports of artists drawing leftward facing animals and human profiles (an effect that is influenced by native language writing system direction, gender, and handedness), but interestingly our sample also contained regions with strong leftward biases. Our results are, however, in accord with studies that report people preferring images that depict left-to-right motion, as well as the left-to-right bias in depicting transitive actions, an effect that seems to result from greater right hemispheric activation in scene processing and interpretation. Thus, this study shows that in the absence of a writing system, right-lateralized neural architecture may guide the hands of artists.

中文翻译：

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没有书面语言的文化所产生的艺术向右偏向。

在这项研究中，我们对画在非洲南部岩石上的艺术进行编码，然后用新石器时代的San（无书面语言）将石，血液和黏土的混合物绘画。这些图像描绘了人类和动物在各种情况下的混合体，包括（但不限于）狩猎和舞蹈。我们计算了每个地区收集到的可用艺术品的横向指数，发现尽管在横向得分的方向上各地区之间存在差异，但大多数地区都包含着大多数朝右的数字。这与艺术家绘制左脸动物和人类轮廓的报告形成鲜明对比（这种影响受母语书写系统的方向，性别和惯用性影响），但有趣的是，我们的样本还包含带有强烈左偏的区域。但是，我们的结果与研究报告一致，即人们偏爱描绘左右运动的图像，以及描绘传递动作的左右偏斜，这种效果似乎是由于右半球激活程度更高在场景处理和解释中。因此，这项研究表明，在没有书写系统的情况下，右偏神经体系结构可能会指导艺术家的手。