Prehistoric cave artists were women

Until now, it was somehow taken for granted that the creators of striking examples of rock art of the Stone Age are males. Apparently, by analogy with the predominance of male artists over the past couple of thousand years. However, it turned out that this was not the case at all. Justice restored Dean Snow (Dean Snow), an archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania.

Snow carefully studied the handprints left by ancient painters on the walls next to their drawings. In particular, he measured images from the French Pech Merle cave (the drawings in it date from 25 to 16 thousand years ago), the Spanish cave Cuevas de El Castillo (handprints in it are 28 thousand years old) and a number of others.

The scientist was interested in the exact dimensions of … fingers. For comparison, Snow took the exact dimensions of the hands of many Europeans in order to identify patterns in the proportions of the index, middle, ring, and so on fingers in men and women.

An analysis of the same parameters in the Stone Age prints led the researcher to the conclusion that most of them belong to women.

This leads to the conclusion that many of the drawings on the walls of the caves were made by women and the role of the weaker sex in the culture of the Stone Age was much greater than scientists had previously assumed.

“We don’t know what the role of artists was in Upper Paleolithic society (50,000 to 10,000 years ago) in general,” the researcher said. “But this is a step forward that says that the vast majority of them were women.”

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