Neolithic Artists

So here’s a provocative set of evidence from our pre-historic past: hand stencils. Among other questions, they raise a debate about whether the first artists were mostly women.

The painted shadows that silhouette the hands you see in this image were frequent subjects of our paleolithic and neolithic ancestors (40,000-1,000 BCE). In 2013, archaeologist Dean Snow became nerd-academic famous when he published a study that suggested that 75% of these hands belonged to women, thus suggesting that they were the majority of the world’s first artists.

Snow based his analysis on the dimensions of the hands he studied, only using extremely clear samples from caves in Europe (only 32 hands, but still the largest data set measured). He argued that the ratio of hands to fingers, the ratio of index finger to little finger, and other hand measurements showed a clear sexual dimorphism (ie, female and male hands have physical differences), and that 24 of the hands belonged to women.

The story is made more interesting by the fact that these hands often appear near large game animals.

So what are we to make of this information? Snow thinks that the women were involved in processing the meat and that would explain the connection. Another archaeologist, Dave Whitley, argues that the hands belonged to shamen (whom he thinks were mostly women but also men), who would have experienced altered consciousness in the caves as they selected what subjects they wanted to paint. Dale Guthrie, an evolutionary biologist, had looked at hands earlier (mostly looking at the size of palm width and thumb) and argued that the hands actually belonged to adolescent boys, who would have been exploring caves for adventure.

And here are my questions: what difference would it have meant for gender relationships if the cave art was mostly done by women? And what would it matter now to imagine that either women, men, or teenage boys made up the majority of artists?