Three in four hands in the caves of France and Spain seem to belong to women
Press your palm to the rock, cover everything around it with paint, lift your hand away, and its outline stays on the wall. People made these stencils in the caves of southern France and northern Spain roughly 40,000 to 12,500 years ago. For a long time cave art was assumed to be about hunting and made by men. Small hands were put down to teenage boys.
Dean Snow, an archaeologist at Penn State, decided to test that. Women's hands differ from men's in more than size: the ratios between finger lengths differ too, something the British biologist John Manning had studied. Snow built formulas from 221 hand scans of 111 people of European descent today and applied them to 32 stencils from eight caves, among them El Castillo in Spain and Gargas and Pech-Merle in France. Twenty-four came out female. He put about 15% down to adolescent boys and only about 10% to adult men.
The method is far from precise. On modern hands, where the answer is known, one of his formulas got the sex right 79% of the time and the other only 60%. But the ancient hands fell at the very edges of the modern range, which makes the inference stronger. Snow admits there is no way to check the ancient stencils. And his formulas didn't work on the hands of Native North Americans today: each population needs its own.
At Pech-Merle, six hands surround the painting of the spotted horses. Snow thinks they may all belong to one woman. She stood at that wall, and her hand is still there.
Sources
- Snow, D. R. (2013). Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art. American Antiquity, 78(4), 746–761. doi:10.7183/0002-7316.78.4.746
- Messer, A. E. (2013, October 15). Women leave their handprints on the cave wall. Penn State News, Pennsylvania State University.