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Most Cave Paintings Were Painted By Women, Says Penn State Researcher
barlevg writes "Analyzing hand-prints found in cave sites, an archaeologist from Penn State University has concluded that roughly 75% of all ancient cave art was painted by women. Previously it was thought that neolithic cave paintings were made mostly by men, perhaps to chronicle their kills. But an analysis of the relative lengths of fingers in hand stencils found on cave walls suggests that it was mostly prehistoric women--not men--who created these works."
In related news, primitive hand stencils in caves are now likely considered as the first crude attempts at nail painting.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
What interested me about his research was the evidence that sexual dimorphism in humans was substantially stronger in the paleolithic than today.
To me that adds credence to the notion that society has removed a lot of the need for distinguishing between genders. Which was neat.
(deserved slap/punch)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yeah, it's the women in my family who actually paint and do art, with architecture and science backgrounds. Nevertheless, guys still have Leonardo to claim.
Perhaps the hand stencils were done after the men finished painting when the ladies were cleaning up the caves.
The paintings are there to boast about their hunting skills and number of kills. The hand prints and stencils are there to boast about the number of women that the caveman has.
It's pretty easy when tracing your hand to not get all teh way down to where the fingers diverge from the palm. That and other mistakes could change the appearance of the stencil and accidentally mask the identity of the hand.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yeah those took a lot of talent (sarcasm) did it occur to the "scientist" that the paintings were done by men and the hand stencils are how many women they owned?
I seriously doubt that women were the painters, because --->>*ALMOST*--- no where else in history do you see a society where in the majority of art and history keeping is done by women.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Or proof of the male artists' ownership of a women (or women).
And precisely how did we decide that these paintings weren't painted by outcast males with girlish mittens? Did we exhume Leonardo or Michelangelo to make sure he was "one of us"?
As well, it's not clear how we go from hand prints to a conclusion about who painted the animal outlines. I just watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last week and I was thinking these thoughts all the while. I doubt we will ever know with any degree of confidence.
That's why Hertzog titled his movie "Forgotten". Because we'll never know. Hertzog is a strange duck, but he's not stupid.
We wonder why so many Americans are ignorant of the standards of science when the only time anything scientific captures their attention, it's complete bullshit wrapped around an intriguing nugget. Selling the bullshit sizzle but not the steak is the reason the majority of the population remains clueless about this important food group.
It seems a little risky to make such a story with the maths they are using. As the article says they tested 32 hand prints, and 24 handprints were female, with the algorithm determining if the handprints belonged to a male or female painter having an accuracy of 60%. That doesn't seem very conclusive to me.
Have they considered the null hypothesis?
Have they thought that perhaps men were simply less narcissistic, and just like on Youtube where women more commonly display their faces in their videos than men, the women stenciled their hands more frequently than the men... You know, because it's the painting not the damn hand that matters -- It's the content not the face presenting it that matters... yet they show their faces, even if it means obscuring a part of the content.
There's something deeply evolutionary to that: Women primarily value social standing of mates. Males primarily value youth and fertility / beauty -- visually identifiable things. As the peacock displays its plumage for the peahen, so to do the female humans instinctively put on displays for their prospective mates, while the guys try to "impress the girls" with what they have, can do, or provide.
"Look at this cave painting I made, I'm a good artist." "Yeah, well look at how sexy my hand is, you like being touched by it."
The study proves nothing, IMO. Look to the neurology we've inherited from our ancestors, there you will find the same ratios you can use to surmise which sex favored/favors certain behaviors now and in the past.
We call it interior decorating
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Not only between genders in Appalacia, between relatives too.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Cave Walls = palaeolithic deviantart.com.
that were the teachers of children too, so they would use the cave painting to teach the children which animals were good for hunting and which were the predators that were dangerous, etc... teaching the basic knowledge for survival, between that and the real life experience evolution sharpened our minds to be what we are today
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Anthropologists debung male-centric myths, tech site breeds tens of sexist-joke comments.
Stay classy.
If you properly chose the cave near the river and berries, the rest of the day can get pretty boring while the guys are digging a new Mammoth Trap.
If this holds true, I can sort of see why that might be. Given the time and lifestyle involved in such times, women were not really allowed to do much of anything. They were, in many cases, owned by the male.
blowing colorful pain on ones hand almost seems to me like something you'd discover by mistake if you were bored enough. You take human beings and put them in a situation where they're not allowed to do much more than raise a child and you'll have them invent some pretty interesting side projects im sure. The males would be too busy out killing one another or hunting an animal or two. You'd naturally have a mix but I could see why a majority of artwork would end up getting done by females.
Were the drawings found next to the surface where they made the sandwiches?
Inclusion of women in everything, entirely for its' own sake, is politically correct at the moment. We need to take that kind of prevailing bias into account, when reading about "research," like this.
There have been numerous female authors who've written revisionist history in a number of other areas, such as historical witch burning and the influence of women in paleolithic societies in other areas. Most of it is unfalsifiable at best, and garbage at worst.
Do not believe any scientific research which claims results that are consistent with prevailing social biases. The reason why, is because such research is unfalsifiable, by definition. You cannot prove whether or not said bias was not involved, in obtaining the result.
Maybe it was not "woment" but "youngsters" doing the cave paintings. Putting graffiti wherever they could, just like today's kids. :D
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
From TFA:
60 percent accuracy isn't that impressive when guessing the same gender every time would give you 50 percent accuracy.
Captcha: disclaim
Or it was a tradition that female slaves were sacrificed to the Spirit of the Opposing Thumb, their hands cut off and used as stencils by male shamans.It's tricky to make deductions based on such limited evidence. It's not like we deduce from other ancient art remains that men had gigantic penises and women had massive mammary glands...
I don't know... It still looks to me like a man cave where a guy keeps trophies of his conquests. :D
they are so damn ugly! It took a man to make real art.
... is that most hand reliefs are likely of a woman's hand, it doesn't mean that they did the art work.
It's a bit of a leap to go from identifying what gender the hand belongs to and who actually did the cave paintings. I'm guessing that the assumption is that the hand relief is the artist's signature. But we have no way of knowing that this is true or not. It could be just another image denoting the artists history (i.e. got married today).
Whoever painted them, cave paintings are cool!!
How about this as a possible explanation, the artist (male) was including not only a record of his hunting prowess, but creating a record of his family as well? With the hand prints of his wife/wives and other members of his family?
Do we have evidence that that correlation has remained constant throughout history (and into prehistory apparently) ? or are we assuming that that is how it has always been since that's how it is now? (assuming of course that that's how it is now.)
From Wikipedia's article on Digit Ratios:
That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s, with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930, after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored. In 1983 Dr Glenn Wilson of King's College, London published a study examining the correlation between assertiveness in women and their digit ratio. This was the first study to examine the correlation between digit ratio and a psychological trait within members of the same sex. Wilson proposed that skeletal structure and personality were simultaneously affected by sex hormone levels in utero. In 1998, John T. Manning and colleagues reported the sex difference in digit ratios was present in two-year-old children and further developed the idea that the index was a marker of prenatal sex hormones.
So we have some evidence the difference was present as early as the 1800's, although that doesn't demonstrate that the ratio has necessarily remained constant, certainly not all the way back to pre-historical times. Given that Digit Ratios are a marker of in-utero exposure to Testosterone levels, I suspect it may very well have shifted over time (due to the correlation between Smoking, Obesity and elevated Testosterone levels in women).
Looking down at my hands, I see that I am a male who happens to be an exception to the rule, with a Digital Ratio of almost exactly 1 (Note: fingers should be measured from the palmar side, from fingertip down to the last skin-crease at the base of the finger; not straight-across the tips of the fingers). Fortunately for me, there is no strong correlation between In-utero and adult Testosterone levels.
a) it concerns paleolithic cave paintings, not neolithic cave paintings as the slashdot summary says
b) so we now know that hand stencils were predominantly made by women. Hand stencils are only a subset of cave painting motivs. It says nothing about the other paint motivs. So the summary saying "75% of cave paintings were made by women" is wrong. 75% of the handstencils were.
We know very little about what went on at that time.
what they found here was that most of the hand prints were women... probably... that is all that means. We can infer more beyond that but it is merely an inference.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Impressive scientific work -- most nerds nave never even come close to touching a female hand.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/05/where-women-rule-the-world-matriarchal-communities-from-albania-to-china-3525234/
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That did lead to a dropoff in talent, but that was because that wasn't their aim. Most of what we as modern viewers see as distortions or poor quality are very deliberate attempts to communicate a higher concept tha[n] literal recreation.
So you're saying that Catholics invented impressionism? 8-/
The other 25% were painted by Gayvmen.
Gayvmen painted the other 25%.
Just because it was a woman's hand being traced doesn't mean it was a woman doing the artwork.. or even the tracing.
Also.. 75% of *found* artwork doesn't necessarily conclude something about 75% of *all* artwork.
Can someone RTFA and tell me if it is just another typically lazy, sloppy, and unintelligent work of stupiditude on the part of Slashdot's subpar editors.. or if this is really as stupid an article as the summary would suggest?
Have gnu, will travel.
I'd believe it. I've seen some old (not ancient) charcoal drawings in a limestone cave on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. The drawings were mainly of head hunting boats and war axes from the Western Province (from a different area the cave is in). The cave is hidden a couple of miles inland from the coast. The scenario would likely be that the war canoes turn up, the men stay to defend and the women and children run inland to the safety of the cave, then draw what they have seen on the cave walls. My other scenario is a mother yelling "would you kids stop drawing on the cave walls!!!!". If it's like my house, that would be much more like it.
Pretty sure they didn't wax back then...
Mittens, 30K years ago?
What is this, an early edition of "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."?
Archaeology PhD here:
This study is for all intents and purposes worthless, for the following reasons:
1. Sample size - the study uses only 32 samples, culled from 3 caves. Fully half the samples are from a single cave in Spain. The rest are from two other. The most from any other cave is 6. Keep in mind that this is out of thousands of "unidentifiable" handprints known to exist in caves spanning tens of thousands of years. Hardly a useful statistical sample.
2. As just stated, many of these caves are known to have been used for thousands of years; each handprint records one individual at one moment in time and is not necessarily representative of the broader history of a cave's use.
3. It is not even known whether the handprints represent the same people who were creating the cave paintings. The assumption that they are "signatures" for the work is just that, an assumption. It could just as well be one individual saying "hey, wanna do a hand stecnil? It's a lot easier than these paintings I'm doing." Or it could also be records of individuals who visited the pre-existing sacred cave images. we just don't know.
4. The biological differences cited in the study are based on samples from the past 200 years, and the suggestion that the cave samples show greater "sexual dimorphism" is problematic. The study simply points out that the range of variation shown is greater than the average in modern humans, then assumes that it is sex linked, when it could represent variation among population isolates, genetic drift, differences between modern/paleo populations, etc. The researchers also present no contemporary skeletal evidence, etc. to support the sexual dimorphosm hypothesis
5. The study only considers one geographic region.
While none of this by any means disproves the proposition that women might have created some, most, or all of this cave art, the study presented here can at best be considered mildly suggestive, neither proves nor disproves anything, and deserved neither peer review nor the massive pres sit has gotten in the mainstream media.
Was it men or women? No.
Without RTFA, I would like to reference modern cave man dwellings, such as my kitchen.
There, all art is created by my kids and is slapped on the walls.
You can't stop them from doing it now, how could our ancestors back in the days before X-box?
So not trophy recording, not god worshiping, just kids painting. Or getting educated by Mom. Either way.
Maybe the artists who signed/marked their pictures were girly-men with low testosterone (and short ring fingers). The real ballsy guys were out killing things.
No, I didn't read the FA.
--
It was a drunk and stormy night. Four shots rang out "Drink us!"