Cave Art found to be mostly done by women

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a collaborative art project with two friends for a contest and show at Diland Arts, the Merchantville Train Station converted into a coffee shop and art gallery.  As part of the project, I have done some research on women of the past who accomplished something interesting as for example Clara Barton who not only started the Red Cross but established the first free one room school in Bordertown  New Jersey.  It came as a surprise when I saw a news item on cave art which demonstrated that most of it was done by women.  I am not entirely surprised by that as women have always participated in artisan and artistic endeavors, weaving, pottery, jewelry, and so on. I have added a piece to my art project to let others know about this discovery.  Here is a copy from the Smithsonian web site:

" It has always been assumed that the people behind this mysterious artwork must have been male. But new research suggests that’s not right: when scientists looked closely at a sample of hand stencils, a common motif in cave art, they concluded that about three-quarters were actually drawn by women.

What they looked at, specifically, was the lengths of fingers in drawings from eight caves in France and Spain, National Geographic writes. Biologists established rules of thumb for general differences between men and women’s hand structure about a decade ago.

Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.

Snow ran the numbers through an algorithm that he had created based on a reference set of hands from people of European descent who lived near his university. Using several measurements—such as the length of the fingers, the length of the hand, the ratio of ring to index finger, and the ratio of index finger to little finger—the algorithm could predict whether a given handprint was male or female. Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn’t especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow’s modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy.

The 32 hand prints he found in the caves, however, were more pronounced in their differences than those of the modern men and women he sampled. Based upon the model and measurements, he found that 75 percent of the hands belonged to women.

Another article:
Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University studied the handprints found across eight different historic cave sites in France and Spain, the most famous ranging from about 12,000 to 40,000 years old. After paying closer attention to the finger lengths of handprints, he found that contrary to popular belief, most of these markings were created by women.

and final article copied:
Some handprints accompanying the most famous ancient cave paintings of ice age mammals such as horses and mammoths—long attributed to males—may have actually belonged to women. That’s the conclusion of a new study, in which a researcher compared the silhouettes of 32 handprints found next to 12,500- to 40,000-year-old cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. Many of the prints, possibly one of the first forms of artist’s signature, are small, which has led some scientists to infer that the art was painted by adolescent males. But the new work, reported this month in American Antiquity, concludes that 24 of the hands belonged to females, based on both the length of the hand and fingers as well as the ratios of lengths of the index finger, ring finger, and little finger. Of the eight remaining handprints, only three depict the hands of adult males; the rest are of adolescent males. It’s likely that each of the hands stenciled on the cave walls—such as these in El Castillo cave in Spain—belong to the artist, not a model, the researcher contends. For one thing, the caves are typically small, so two people would probably have had trouble fitting into the small space together. Also, more than three-fourths of the hands depicted are left hands, which is the most likely one to be stenciled by a right-handed artist.

I personally, as an artist, find it so moving that these women artists left their handprints, their signature on their creations for us in the future to know they were there.   The article on the National Geographic web site was equally interesting, just google Cave Art by Women and both sites pop up!

Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com