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."

Comments

What interested me

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:What interested me

[Anonymous Coward]

While the full study may have done a better job at establishing this than the article, I'm less than convinced that the dimorphism was actually sexual dimorphism. The article made it sound like the scientists built a contemporary database of hand dimensions, which showed a slight sexual dimorphism. They then compared this database with the hand prints from cave paintings, and found a much more dramatic split between the different morphologies (the archeologist stated that "they fall at the extreme ends, and even beyond the extreme ends"). I am not an anthropologist, but when I read that, I read that the scale is broken, not that we can say that "men were men and women were women". It seems equally (maybe more) likely that the major differences were more the result of tribal isolation, since there was no information suggesting that they had compared actual neolithic remains against their scale.

If there are biologists out there who can tell me why my skepticism is stupid, I'd love to hear about it. At the moment, though, I'm in the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" state of skepticism.

Don't discount the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A primate tale as old as time.

[VortexCortex]

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.

Re:Is that why they lack perspective?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I was a big art history buff back in the day and humanity has had the same artistic ability throughout our history. What changes is the purpose of an artistic creation. Some cave painting were used in hunting rituals (they can sometimes be seen scratched with weapons), so they weren't intended to be too realistic as the theory I heard says that might capture the spirit of the animal somehos. You can see in some cave paintings that the artists are well aware of perspective (legs of animals are accurate 3D projections) and even do a pretty good job of capturing proportions of prey animals; including making females pregnant.

Medieval art loses its "quality" because Christian culture at the time viewed art as an earthly pursuit. Even paintings of religious icons if don't too well could be perceived as idoltry. 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 that literal recreation.

Re:Makes sense in some ways

[cusco]

Given the time and lifestyle involved in such times, women were not really allowed to do much of anything.

Citation Needed. If you look at neolithic cultures around the world the society you describe was actually rare. Hunter/gathering societies need both parts of that equation; people hunting food and people gathering food. Interestingly, different societies partition the food processing differently. Sometimes the men do the grinding, sometimes it's the women, sometimes the men do all the butchering, sometimes the women do. IIRC, two New Guinea tribes considered each other heretics because in one group only the men cooked the meat, and in the other only the women did.

Re:Small and Unreliable Sample?

[dcollins]

"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%."

60% accuracy for the modern sample, not the research sample. FTA:

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. Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.