My first lecture of the semester showed us among other things cave art. Cave art is something I find really fascinating, especially the stencilled hand prints. There is something really powerful about them. they are a direct physical link to the past. The reason I’m talking about them today is that I read an interesting article on the National Geographic website, which I will link at the end, which concerned a recent study of cave art hand prints made by a archaeologist Dean Snow. Snow has examined and measured hand prints on cave walls from several different sites and concluded that contrary to belief, that three quarters of the hand prints belonged to women. Snow theory follows in the workings of John Manning, who worked out differences in hand and finger size between men and women. Now I’m kind of sceptical about this male/ female definite hand size difference. Manning worked on the difference between finger lengths whereas an evolutionary biologist by the name of R. Dale Guthrie performed a similar analysis but he measured the width of the palm from the thumb. He deduced that most the prehistoric hand prints belonged to teenage boys. But with all things prehistory we can only imagine their society and its structure, we will never really know. In my opinion the hand prints are like signatures. But why create artwork at all. Some believe that if the women created the artwork it would have a lot to do with the wellbeing of the group and to record events. However others believe that if it was teenage boys creating the cave art they would draw only what they liked, hulking animals and naked ladies, sex and violence in other words, which paints the adolescent male in very broad primitive strokes. Which links in to the outdated perception that cave art and sculpture, such as the Venus figures were prehistoric porn. This has pretty much been disproved as they were most likely fertility figures, made for good luck, protection, religion or spirituality. Most likely the handprints were made by men and women, it just so happens nobody’s said so before. I always assumed the hand prints were the artists (of both sex) making there mark or some sort of group ritual. In my mind cave art would have been a shared experience for an entire community.
National Geographic article: HUGHES, V. Were the first artists mostly women? Available at : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20131011news-caveart&utm_campaign=Content#close-modal
Also here is a link to a BBC clip of some very early cave art featuring handprints from the Altamira cave in Spain :http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18459492
All of the above links were accessed on the 13.10.2013.
I’d also like to say thank you to all the people who have liked, commented on and follow my blog. 🙂
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