"Handprints in ancient cave art most often belonged to women, overturning the dogma that the earliest artists were all men" (Photo by Dean Snow, found on National Geographic)
Or, at least, that's what a new archaeology study claims! Girl power on the Stone Age, people, that's what I'm talking about!
A new analysis of hand prints found in several caves habited by humans in the past suggests that women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings. Up until now, there was sort of an archaeological dogma which stated that those drawings were made by men, to represent their huntings or even as a magic ritual to guarantee a sucessfull hunt.
By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, the archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. According to him, "in most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are".
This discovery was only possible because, more than ten years ago, John Manning, a British biologist (go biologists!!!) found out that men and women differ in the relative lengths of their fingers: women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, while men's ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.
A new analysis of hand prints found in several caves habited by humans in the past suggests that women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings. Up until now, there was sort of an archaeological dogma which stated that those drawings were made by men, to represent their huntings or even as a magic ritual to guarantee a sucessfull hunt.
By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, the archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. According to him, "in most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are".
This discovery was only possible because, more than ten years ago, John Manning, a British biologist (go biologists!!!) found out that men and women differ in the relative lengths of their fingers: women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, while men's ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.
~Ally
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