Women, Not Men, Painted Ancient Handprints on Cave Walls

Hands are part of what make us human. We can manipulate objects dexterously and use tools with our five digits. It's perhaps not surprising that our ancient ancestors left handprints as part of artwork on cave walls. Yet now, scientists have uncovered a bit more about prints on certain walls; it turns out that most of the handprints are from women rather than men.

In the past, anthropologists assumed that handprints, whether stencils or actual paint-dipped prints, were produced by men. Other pictures on the cave walls usually consisted of hunting scenes, so the researchers thought that any smaller prints were probably from adolescent boys. However, it seems that this may not be the case.

In order to study the handprints a bit further, the researchers traveled to a number of caves. There, they measured the size ratios of the handprints. In addition, they used a few existing images with size indications. Then, they collected hand images from people with European and Mediterranean ancestry.

In order to successfully differentiate male hands from female hands, the researchers needed to undergo a two-step process. First, they measured the overall size of the hand using five different measurements. This separated the adult hands from the rest. In the end, they found that step one was 79 percent successful in determining sex, but adolescent males were classified as female.

Step two involved comparing the ratios of the index finger to the ring finger and the index finger to the pinky. This helped distinguish between adolescent males and females. For the known hands, the success rate was only 60 percent--there was too much overlap in modern populations. Yet it turns out that in ancient populations, there was more sexual dimorphism, which allowed the researchers to determine the sex of ancient handprints.

"I thought the fact that we had so much overlap in the modern world would make it impossible to determine the sex of the ancient handprints," said Dean Snow, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But old hands all fall at or beyond the extremes of the modern populations. Sexual dimorphism was greater than it is now."

What did the researchers find? The first step showed that only 10 percent of the handprints on cave walls in Spain and France were left by adult males. The second step indicated that 15 percent were placed by adolescent males; this leaves 75 percent of the handprints made by females.

The findings reveal a little bit more about the ancient culture of these people. More specifically, it shows that handprints were made more by females in cave art than by males.

The findings are published in the journal American Antiquity.