Most Neanderthals were right handed, just like modern humans, and this tendency suggests that they may have had the capacity for speech, new research claims.

A new investigation by Professor Frayer and an international team led by Virginie Volpato of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, has confirmed Regourdou’s right-handedness by looking more closely at the robustness of the arms and shoulders, and comparing it with scratches on his teeth.

'We’ve been studying scratch marks on Neanderthal teeth, but in all cases they were isolated teeth, or teeth in mandibles not directly associated with skeletal material,' said Professor Frayer.

'This is the first time we can check the pattern that’s seen in the teeth with the pattern that’s seen in the arms. We did more sophisticated analysis of the arms — the collarbone, the humerus, the radius and the ulna — because we have them on both sides. And we looked at cortical thickness and other biomechanical measurements. All of them confirmed that everything was more robust on the right side then the left.'