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.