The Paleo Artists

No one could ever imagine that in Europeans of the Upper Paleolithic era that after 27,000 years of ancient Europeans' deaths, someone would be arguing over whether these ancient people cut off their own fingers. For decades, experts have been fighting over a subset of cave paintings which was found in Europe depict hands with missing fingers or parts of fingers.

Argument is whether ere the artists bending their fingers down to create the illusion of missing digits or the fingers were actually missing on them and what could be the reason. In a new paper, researchers argued that the amputations may have been real and deliberate however this could not convince other with one telling Live Science that the study is ill-informed. The mysterious hand images are found in caves in Spain and France, with most of the paintings dating to around 22,000 to 27,000 years ago. Some of the images were made by dipping a hand in paint and pressing it against the cave wall whereby in others, someone placed a hand on the wall and then blew paint around it, creating a negative image surrounded by a spattering of paint. Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, who was also a part of the study said that in most of the 40 European caves with handprint art, all fingers are present and accounted for. Over the decades, researchers have suggested various explanations for these missing fingers. Some said that artists who'd lost fingers to frostbite to the deliberate folding of the fingers in some sort of sign language or finger-counting method. Brea McCauley, a master's student in archaeology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, who studied over this said "It really became clear that this is a widespread practice, more so than anyone has discussed in the past." The researchers found that the most common reasons for cutting off one's own fingers were as a sacrifice or as a mark of mourning. According to a new report from 1825, it is believed that an elderly indigenous woman in South Africa who had removed a finger joint for each of three of her children upon their deaths. But in other cases, fingers were removed to mark someone as part of a particular group or profession. McCauley and her colleagues mentioned that the practices that best fit the cave evidence were amputation as self-sacrifice or as marks of mourning. In an email sent to Live Science, it was mentioned ‘ethnographically, if amputations occur, they are typically of the little finger: It would be idiotic to amputate more’. McCauley also had acknowledged that the new ethnographies were unlikely to settle the debate; rather, she said, this study simply suggests that researchers shouldn't dismiss the possibility that the artists really were missing digits.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.livescience.com/64228-paleo-artists-cut-off-fingers.html