A recent study from mainland China has highlighted the types of archaeological insights that are expected to become increasingly common as artificial intelligence (AI) technology is employed more widely.
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The team, from Liverpool University in Suzhou and Renmin University in Beijing, conducted an in-depth analysis of one of the earliest forms of writing – oracle bones –to determine whether the 3,000-year-old authors were left-handed or right-handed.
In a preprint that has not yet undergone peer review, the team utilised digital copies of oracle bones and employed an unsupervised deep-learning tool called Bone2Vec to analyse the inscriptions.
Their goal was to gain further insight into whether humans were biologically predisposed to being right-handed, or if that phenomenon arose from the development of societies.
Wang Hefei, a study author and associate dean at the Liverpool University International Business School, told the Post that the research “indeed suggests that handedness might be rooted in biology”.