How do we know the gender distribution of cave art painters?

Question

I recently visited an exhibition about climate, nature and culture during the last glacial period.

One interactive exhibit about cave paintings sported a plaque saying:

"...Jetzt wissen wir, dass es genauso viele Künstlerinnen wie Künstler gab, wenn nicht sogar mehr."

My translation to English:

"...Now we know that there were as many female artists as male artists, if not more."

I have been asking myself, and now all of you:

How do we know that? What evidence has survived that can discriminate between the sexes of the painters?

Translated text:

Cave art

What is the meaning of the picture caves? Maybe some tell a creation story or other myths that we no longer know? Maybe the walls are contact zones to a world beyond? The picture caves enchant us with light and shadow, shapes and colors. For a long time it was thought that cave art was a male thing or served initiation rites for male youths. Now we know that there were as many female artists as male artists, if not more.

Helcome to History SE. Entering text as graphic is problematic because it sabotages search functions. Also, you're obviously quoting, but without proper attribution. — o.m., Sep 04 '22 at 08:57
Presenting text in the form of images also interferes with screen readers used by some users who are visually impaired: the built-in screen reader in Windows 10 will read this as (randomly picked example) "image 128 by 256 pixels" or some such. — njuffa, Sep 04 '22 at 09:25
You might also add exactly the venue you encountered this. Liike perhaps https://www.lokschuppen.de/eiszeit/ausstellung ? — LаngLаngС, Sep 04 '22 at 09:35
@njuffa If you take care to differentiate the explanatory reach of 'your' paper and the over-sweeping & over-confident claim on the display, then you have one quite interesting answer to illuminate this? — LаngLаngС, Sep 04 '22 at 09:38
I had hoped by including the relevant section as text the image would only serve as illustration and not put off anybody.
I do not know the precise author of that plaque, as it was only presented in the context of the exhibition. Which I have attributed, if incompletely. I am sorry.

LangLangC: Yes, you are correct. I saw this in Rosenheim, but I believe the exhibition is touring.

@axsvl Thank you for the link. I will definitely follow that up! — Marian Aldenhövel, Sep 05 '22 at 09:42
Nobody is 'put off' (I guess from 'I'm not';)), as these comments are 'suggestions to improve' the question. (The 'relevant' quote was actually quite good/helpful already)) You can 'fix this' with an [edit]-in of relevant parts (like source of exhibition/Rosenheim), instead of merely only commenting. Have a look at [help] and [meta] perhaps starting with FAQ. — LаngLаngС, Sep 05 '22 at 14:40

Henning Kockerbeck · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-05T18:44:46.303

72

A significant portion of cave paintings are so called "hand stencils": People pressed one hand onto the wall and applied color around the hand.

Image: Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina / Wikipedia

So from these paintings, we can infer the shape of the artist's hand. It had been known for a long time that among the hand stencils there were bigger and smaller hands. One older interpretation was that the bigger hands belonged to older, experienced (male) hunters, and the smaller hands belonged to young (male) "novices", maybe as some kind of intiation ritual.

But about ten or twenty years ago, scientists started to look closer into the hand shapes, and found interesting results. The proportions of a male hand and a female hand tend to be different. For example, with males the ring finger is typically significantly longer than the index finger. With females it's the other way around, or both fingers are of about equal length.

One of the first scientists to look into this was Dean Snow, an anthropologist from Pennsylvania State University. According to an German article on wissenschaft.de, the homepage of the German science magazine "bild der wissenschaft", he leafed through a photo book with pictures of stone-age cave art. There, he ran across a hand stencil that clearly didn't originate from a man, but from a woman. In that book alone, out of the six stencils shown, four were from female hands.

Snow decided to look closer into this, visited several caves with stone age art in Europe and got high-res photos from other caves. Additionally, he took measurements from the hands of contemporary people from the respective regions. He found that only about 10% of the stone age hand stencils had originated from adult males, and 15% from juveniles. The vast majority of 75% of the stencils clearly had originated from adult females. According to Snow's measurements, the sexual dimorphism of the human hand was even more pronounced 30.000 years ago than it is today. He had feared that because of the significant overlap today, it might be hard to assign the sex of the stencils' creators. But the stone age hands all fell into the extreme areas of the modern statistical distribution.

Snow published his findings in a paper in the journal "Antiquity" in 2006. Since, other scientists also found that at least the hand stencils weren't as much of a "male domain" as had been assumed before, for example Paul Pettitt (Durham University) et al., also in "Antiquity".

Obviously, this method won't work for other cave paintings like depictions of animals.

edited Sep 05 '22 at 18:44

answered Sep 04 '22 at 10:05

Henning Kockerbeck

1,013
7
7

16

"For example, with males the ring finger is typically significantly longer than the index finger. With females it's the other way around, or both fingers are of about equal length." When I looked this up, the research seemed to be divided on the topic. – Nobody Sep 04 '22 at 18:48
@Nobody Was it "divided" or did you find one researcher who didn't like it? You can find peer-reviewed articles contrary to anything, doesn't mean the research is divided in general. – pipe Sep 04 '22 at 21:23
13

@pipe Divided as in one of the first results when you search for it is a Wikipedia article calling the method a pseudo-science with lots of citations for the claim that the ratio between the length of those fingers is not meaningful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio – Nobody Sep 04 '22 at 21:29
27

"Can you hold your hand on the stone while I paint it?" - "Sure, go ahead". Why would the hand shape of the cave painting have any relation to the artist? – Yanick Salzmann Sep 04 '22 at 22:44
22

@YanickSalzmann Just from looking at that picture, most of the hands appear to be left hands. Assuming that handedness ratios aren't something that has changed significantly in the last 30,000 years (which I have no evidence for on either side), it's going to be much easier for most people to paint around their own left hand with their right than it will be to do the reverse. If you're going to paint around someone else's hand, I'd expect a more balanced mix of hands, based on the angles involved. It's by no means certain, but it seems logical to me. – Bobson Sep 05 '22 at 00:38
3

Regarding "One older interpretation was that the bigger hands belonged to older, experienced (male) hunters, and the smaller hands belonged to young (male) "novices", maybe as some kind of intiation ritual.": Did they have a basis for thinking that, or was that just a random guess someone offered as a hypothetical? – Nat Sep 05 '22 at 07:34
24

@Nobody I scanned through the Wikipedia article. It appears that "in males the ring finger is typically significantly longer than the index finger, and vice-versa for women" is not contentious (statistically significant datasets exists). What is accused to be pseudoscience is the reason behind why this difference exists and what traits can be predicted based on the finger's ratio. This latter does not matter for the above answer. – Dhara Sep 05 '22 at 08:05
1

@Dhara: This study suggests that it's not a male/female thing so much as a (bigger/smaller)-hands thing. Based on that study's claims, it would seem that a bunch of hand-prints with differing digit-ratios would reflect hand-prints of differing sizes rather than sexes. – Nat Sep 05 '22 at 08:25
4

Incidentally, some of these arguments do read like pseudo-science.. or perhaps more charitably as poorly-done science, since it seems like they're trying to use scientific-reasoning, it just doesn't sound like it's done well. – Nat Sep 05 '22 at 08:34
@Nat that study does not dispute that a difference exists; but says that difference is correlated to hand size. It would be logical to ask whether smaller hands of children/teens can be confused with women -- is the ratio for them more similar to women?... but I could find many papers with a quick search showing that the male:female 2d:4d ratio is similar in children as in adults. – Dhara Sep 05 '22 at 08:35
@Dhara: Their paper shows their classifier. Looks like they used measured each hand-print for 5 numbers: lengths of all the fingers (excluding the thumb) and "overall hand length", with different data-sets for right hands vs. left hands. They fit some classifiers based on an n=111 sample of.. student-volunteers? – Nat Sep 05 '22 at 09:05
Can you back up the "significant portion" part with actual numbers & reference? I guess the last line ('doesn't work for others') would greatly benefit from context and emphasis. Statement from the exhibition plaque is too far reaching in its simplistic interpretation and assuredness ("We now know" not really that much in either direction, and as wrong as the 'must be male' angle surely is, the 'mostly female artists' counter narrative is just as shaky as that. 'Female hand models' would be another, but in any case: the weakest link is the "we know" assertion…) More weighing & context – LаngLаngС Sep 05 '22 at 14:48
@Nat I suspect that men tend to have larger hands than women, so there's a second-level correlation. – Barmar Sep 05 '22 at 16:40
1

@Malady Sorry, seems I got my languages mixed up there ;) "Foto" is the current German spelling, since the 1990s spelling reform. – Henning Kockerbeck Sep 05 '22 at 18:47
2

@Nat A different article from the same German website I quoted in the answer states it quite well (translated by me): "The interpretations of the cave art seems to have changed every few decades, depending on the zeitgeist of the time." Earlier authors probably stated arguments for their interpretations, but everybody's views are "tinted" by the person's views of the world to some degree. Just think of Rudolf Virchows view on the original Neanderthal man, for example. – Henning Kockerbeck Sep 05 '22 at 19:00
@LаngLаngС The hand stencils being a "significant portion" of cave paintings was based on the second article, which I already refered to in my previous comment to Nat. This article says (translated by me): "But cave art has a much broader spectrum than just the well-known animal depictions and animal frescos. On the creators of another big sector - images of hands and fingers - the veil is currently lifted." Actual numbers would probably justify a question of its own. – Henning Kockerbeck Sep 05 '22 at 19:17
@Bobson My understanding is that the technique used for painting these was to have the paint in your mouth and spray it at your hand, airbrush style, not use a brush with the other hand. (Obviously you wouldn't do this with modern paint as it's usually toxic, but whatever they were using wasn't - or at least not strongly toxic enough to cause immediate serious problems.) So with this technique, there's no reason to favor one hand over the other. The fact that these are mostly left hands must have some other significance. – Darrel Hoffman Sep 06 '22 at 13:55
@DarrelHoffman I thought it was to have the paint in a tube, and blow the paint through the tube at your hand. I would naturally hold the tube in my right hand and stencil my left. – Martin Bonner supports Monica Sep 06 '22 at 15:41
@MartinBonnersupportsMonica Maybe there's a tube. Either way, it's blown by the mouth, so doesn't require much in the way of manual dexterity. Yeah, you might need one hand to hold the tube, but that's not really any harder to do with your non-dominant hand, which is why I suspect there was some other significance to it. – Darrel Hoffman Sep 06 '22 at 15:52
@DarrelHoffman Quite possible. I was envisioning something more like dabbing with a wet cloth than an actual brush, but a breath-powered spray seems viable too. Any idea if someone's tried to recreate these? – Bobson Sep 06 '22 at 16:37
1

@Bobson Yes, people did try ;) There's a whole field called experimental archaeology that does things like that. I remember seeing demonstrations on German TV years ago, but I don't have videos of that handy. – Henning Kockerbeck Sep 06 '22 at 17:06

score 9 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 06 '22 at 06:40

9

The evidence for equal male/female participation seems to be 'hand stencils'.

I'm sure the conclusions that have been reached about the sex of each hand are correct. And yes, in a narrow sense, it makes each participant an 'artist'.

But only in a narrow sense. A male or female hand print 'signing' a hunting scene would be more persuasive (though it might only indicate 'I killed this beast'). A wall full of prints just records 'there were this many people'. It tells us nothing about who organised the project.

"Maybe the walls are contact zones to a world beyond?" I'm afraid the gender 'evidence' is just as fanciful, though attractive to today's thought.

edited Sep 06 '22 at 06:40

Greg Martin

107
1

answered Sep 05 '22 at 19:14

Laurence

525
3
5

So if a graffiti artist comes up with the idea of "let's all tag that wall", that makes that one person the sole artist because the others "just participated"? I don't think so. And what makes a hunting scene more important than a hand stencil? – DevSolar Sep 06 '22 at 07:35
3

A better analogy might be a letter to a newspaper with multiple signatures. One person wrote it. The rest just agreed and signed. – Laurence Sep 06 '22 at 12:12
You distinguish between hunting scene ("art") and hand stencil ("signature"). I don't, and I don't quite like the distinction. Either says "this was us, and this was our life". – DevSolar Sep 06 '22 at 13:00
@DevSolar The second merely says: "I have at least one hand". – Gregory Currie Sep 06 '22 at 14:09
@GregoryCurrie The former merely says: "I can draw lines on a wall". – wizzwizz4 Sep 06 '22 at 22:09
A mass 'I exist' is of a different level to an individual 'I can illustrate this activity'. – Laurence Sep 06 '22 at 22:13
Even if there were no hand stencils, we could safely assume that whether men did the paintings or women did it, if there was a good amount of love between them and sufficient free time, they'd have wanted to participate in what each other did. I could imagine standing there painting something, and my little sister would be jumping up and down next to me, asking if she could do some painting too. Tom Sawyer would know that's true. – Nav Sep 07 '22 at 09:26

How do we know the gender distribution of cave art painters?

2 Answers2