Paintings by cavemen? Make that caveWOMEN

AFTER a long day hunting cavemen would return home to chart their exploits on the walls in paintings...or would they? Analysis of humanity's oldest artworks has provided convincing evidence that most of them were actually painted by women.

The cave paintings analysed were similar to these, in Argentina. Picture: Supplied

AFTER a long hard day hunting woolly mammoths, a caveman would return to his primitive home.

And while his family watched, he would chart his exploits on the walls in paintings to be discovered thousands of years later by modern man. Or would he?

Analysis of humanity's oldest artworks - cave paintings depicting thrilling hunting scenes - has provided convincing evidence that most of them were actually painted by women.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University analysed the stencilled hand prints on cave pictures in France and Spain from the Upper-Palaeolithic period about 40,000 years ago. They looked at hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls that sit alongside depictions of game animals such as bison, reindeer and woolly mammoths being pursued by hunters.

Experts had originally concluded that male hunters daubed the images on the cave walls in an attempt to chronicle their kills or perhaps saw the pictures as some sort of 'hunting magic' to increase their chances of future success.

But taking the work of biologist John Manning, who proved that a man's ring finger is significantly longer than his index finger while women's corresponding fingers tend to be the same length, archaeologists were able to conclude that three-quarters of the hand prints were female.

Analysing 32 hand prints in caves and taking into account the length of both the hand and fingers, researchers concluded that 24 of the hands belonged to females. Of the eight remaining handprints, three are adult males, and five adolescent males.

Additionally, industry experts Sciencemagazine.orgreport that "it's likely that each of the hands stenciled on the cave walls belong to the artist, not a model. For one thing, the caves are typically small, so two people would probably have had trouble fitting into the small space together.

"Also, more than three-fourths of the hands depicted are left hands, which is the most likely one to be stenciled by a right-handed artist," they said.

The revelation not only has implications for future studies of prehistoric art, but also challenges the assumption that it has traditionally been men who 'bring home the bacon' the archaeologists explained. This is because if the women were able to paint the hunting scenes, then it is likely that they must have been there to watch them happening, rather than waiting expectantly at home.

Lead researcher Dean Snow agreed that "in most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp.

"Women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are. It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around," he said.

The new research contradicts earlier analysis of the hand prints that concluded that they all belonged to adolescent boys. Evolutionary biologist Dale Guthrie claimed that the boys would have wanted to explore the caves for adventure, drawing on the walls "what was on their mind - naked women and large, frightening"

 - With the Daily Mail