One of the few things I remember distinctly from Latin class was that the meaning of the Latin word "sinistra" was left, as in left-handed. And that this word has come down to us directly as the modern word "sinister," which means threatening or ominous.

Sister Noel Marie sternly informed us that the superstition - that left-handed people were not to be trusted - would not be tolerated in her class. No jokes or ribbing about the left-handed people in the class or in our lives, or we would have the opportunity to deal with her on a less than pleasant basis.

Sister Noel Marie might have stopped teenage girls in horrible blue plaid uniforms in their tracks, but she couldn't reach out across the decades and stop science. Or at least, she didn't stop French scientists Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond.

In western societies, left-handedness runs around a steady 10% of the general population, while in one-on-one contact sports, like boxing and fencing, it's higher. Left-handers have the advantage of surprise and angle of approach. Tune into any baseball game on television and as close games move to their final moments, you see the constant strategic switching of pitchers and batters - you don't want the wrong arm pitching to the wrong bat.

But now let's think about violence. Prior to the technology of the gun and other weapons which let you render damage from afar, fighting was on a one-on-one basis. In small clans and tribes, people who were left-handed might be more successful in a fight more often than the run-of-the-mill right-handed fella. (Now, I say "fella" here without getting into the testosterone specifics, and I hope you can appreciate that.) That said, maybe in those societies, could there have been a higher prevalence of left-handers? And how would we know?

Enter the French scientists.

Faurie and Raymond studied some eight traditional tribal societies currently in place on our planet. From the Yanomami of Venezuela to the Jula ("Dioula") people of West Africa. They counted the left-handers, and they also counted the homicide rate, proposing it as a yet another one-on-one activity.

Among the most peaceful, left-handers made up only 4% of the population, much less than the Western norm. But in the most violent tribe, which sustains a homicide rate many times that of Manhattan, left-handers made up a surprising 22% of the population.

The results of this study were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, although they make no definitive conclusions about left-handed people and violence. Then again, it's what they did try to study.

So, I would simply like to say that I have thought about it, and thought about it some more, and read, and researched and reflected, and I can't think of a single reason why this scientific research is going to get us anywhere.

And you'll just have to take my word for it: I came to this on my own, despite the sinister specter of Sister Noel Marie.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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