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Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women

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Category: Anthropology & Archeology

Via: loretta-mashkawidee-kemsley • 11 years ago • 11 comments

Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.

This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they'd find on their hunt, and it's widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.

But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/prehistoric-cave-prints-show-most-early-artists-were-women-8C11391268

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seeder Loretta Mashkawide'e Kemsley 11 years ago

"The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks. Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it's possible that "had something to do with it."

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Kavika 11 years ago

Like much of history, it was researched and presentedby white males, who cannot comprehend that anyone other than a white male could possibly have the skills to accomplish a task that they deemed done by males.

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Petey Coober 11 years ago

Modern nerd art is done strictly by white males ...

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Kavika 11 years ago

''nerd art''...LMAO, well that settles it. Nerds R White.

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seeder Loretta Mashkawide'e Kemsley 11 years ago

Ain't that the truth. Back in the 1990s, Jeanine Davis-Kimball took a new look at skeletons found on the Steppes. They were assumed to be male because they were buried with weapons. Nope. They were female.

She said in an interview last week, she and her Russian colleagues have found, lying in the graves, skeletons of early Iron Age women who must have held a unique position in society. "They seem to have controlled much of the wealth, performed rituals for their families and clan, rode horseback, and possibly hunted saiga, a steppe antelope, and other small game," shesaid.

And when their territory or possessions were threatened, they took to their saddles armed with bows and arrows, ready to defend their animals, pastures and clan, according to Davis-Kimball. Thus, she believes, they may well have been the very Amazons that Herodotus described, or at least theircontemporaries.

She took DNA from the skeletons and proved at least one young Mongolian woman was descended from one of the women warriors. She's written five books on these and other finds proving women had a larger role in society than white male archaeologists ever imagined.

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Dowser 11 years ago

What a wonderful article and quite fascinating! So, since Neolithic times, when women were important, how oh earth did we become "chattel"?

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Larry Hampton 11 years ago

I think it's also surprising that the reason for the art in the first place has to be ritualistic or spititual in it's interpretation. just how do we know that they didn't do it because it was entertaining, or individualistic, or part of a story , or who knows what.