Most Cave Paintings Were Painted By Women, Says Penn State Researcher 205
barlevg writes "Analyzing hand-prints found in cave sites, an archaeologist from Penn State University has concluded that roughly 75% of all ancient cave art was painted by women. Previously it was thought that neolithic cave paintings were made mostly by men, perhaps to chronicle their kills. But an analysis of the relative lengths of fingers in hand stencils found on cave walls suggests that it was mostly prehistoric women--not men--who created these works."
What interested me (Score:5, Interesting)
What interested me about his research was the evidence that sexual dimorphism in humans was substantially stronger in the paleolithic than today.
To me that adds credence to the notion that society has removed a lot of the need for distinguishing between genders. Which was neat.
Re:Is that why they lack perspective? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't discount the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
The paintings are there to boast about their hunting skills and number of kills. The hand prints and stencils are there to boast about the number of women that the caveman has.
Re:What interested me (Score:5, Interesting)
While the full study may have done a better job at establishing this than the article, I'm less than convinced that the dimorphism was actually sexual dimorphism. The article made it sound like the scientists built a contemporary database of hand dimensions, which showed a slight sexual dimorphism. They then compared this database with the hand prints from cave paintings, and found a much more dramatic split between the different morphologies (the archeologist stated that "they fall at the extreme ends, and even beyond the extreme ends"). I am not an anthropologist, but when I read that, I read that the scale is broken, not that we can say that "men were men and women were women". It seems equally (maybe more) likely that the major differences were more the result of tribal isolation, since there was no information suggesting that they had compared actual neolithic remains against their scale.
If there are biologists out there who can tell me why my skepticism is stupid, I'd love to hear about it. At the moment, though, I'm in the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" state of skepticism.
A primate tale as old as time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have they considered the null hypothesis?
Have they thought that perhaps men were simply less narcissistic, and just like on Youtube where women more commonly display their faces in their videos than men, the women stenciled their hands more frequently than the men... You know, because it's the painting not the damn hand that matters -- It's the content not the face presenting it that matters... yet they show their faces, even if it means obscuring a part of the content.
There's something deeply evolutionary to that: Women primarily value social standing of mates. Males primarily value youth and fertility / beauty -- visually identifiable things. As the peacock displays its plumage for the peahen, so to do the female humans instinctively put on displays for their prospective mates, while the guys try to "impress the girls" with what they have, can do, or provide.
"Look at this cave painting I made, I'm a good artist." "Yeah, well look at how sexy my hand is, you like being touched by it."
The study proves nothing, IMO. Look to the neurology we've inherited from our ancestors, there you will find the same ratios you can use to surmise which sex favored/favors certain behaviors now and in the past.
Re:making a big splash with bad science (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is that why they lack perspective? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a big art history buff back in the day and humanity has had the same artistic ability throughout our history. What changes is the purpose of an artistic creation. Some cave painting were used in hunting rituals (they can sometimes be seen scratched with weapons), so they weren't intended to be too realistic as the theory I heard says that might capture the spirit of the animal somehos. You can see in some cave paintings that the artists are well aware of perspective (legs of animals are accurate 3D projections) and even do a pretty good job of capturing proportions of prey animals; including making females pregnant.
Medieval art loses its "quality" because Christian culture at the time viewed art as an earthly pursuit. Even paintings of religious icons if don't too well could be perceived as idoltry. That did lead to a dropoff in talent, but that was because that wasn't their aim. Most of what we as modern viewers see as distortions or poor quality are very deliberate attempts to communicate a higher concept that literal recreation.
Re:What interested me (Score:4, Interesting)
d) you don't know anything about it, either.
I'd be willing to bet folks much smarter than you know plenty of "shit" (to use your academic term) about life "back then."
Like anything else, it's pretty easy to simply dismiss that which you do not understand.
Re:Makes sense in some ways (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the time and lifestyle involved in such times, women were not really allowed to do much of anything.
Citation Needed. If you look at neolithic cultures around the world the society you describe was actually rare. Hunter/gathering societies need both parts of that equation; people hunting food and people gathering food. Interestingly, different societies partition the food processing differently. Sometimes the men do the grinding, sometimes it's the women, sometimes the men do all the butchering, sometimes the women do. IIRC, two New Guinea tribes considered each other heretics because in one group only the men cooked the meat, and in the other only the women did.
Re:Small and Unreliable Sample? (Score:5, Interesting)
"As the article says they tested 32 hand prints, and 24 handprints were female, with the algorithm determining if the handprints belonged to a male or female painter having an accuracy of 60%."
60% accuracy for the modern sample, not the research sample. FTA:
Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn't especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow's modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy. Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.
Re:What interested me (Score:4, Interesting)
The Kinsey studies were flawed and debunked a while ago. Get with the times.
Just like Newton's ideas about gravity and the mechanistic universe were shown as flawed and debunked by the advent of relativity and quantum theory.
Being incomplete, yes, even being flawed, is not to be unexpected for scientific theories and studies. Indeed, almost all such endeavors in the history of mankind turned out to be flawed and incomplete. That does not diminish their importance though, as attempts to reduce the blurriness of our understanding of the world.
This is why I led my post with the deliberate statement of "[...] if the Kinsey studies have shown one thing [...]"; implying directly that I know that they were somewhat flawed and in many ways also a product of their times.
Still, their importance (along with similar studies done in Europe around the same time) helped western society grasp that a binary model of sexuality is even more deeply flawed and incomplete.
That is not to say the binary model does not approximately correspond to nature -- after all most species need heterosexual sex to procreate. It merely needed pointing out that it was missing a lot of the nuances of reality. Nuances that, when ignored, can lead to to wrong conclusions and predictions. And since these are applied to humans (instead of falling apples, to stay with Newton), the results of such errors can be quite ugly.
Re:Is that why they lack perspective? (Score:4, Interesting)
Medieval art is not "poor quality" in my observation. It's often quite carefully done and ornate. Thus your theory about "done too well being idolatry" (paraphrased) does not hold much water in my opinion.
But that art it also highly abstract. The lack of perspective seemed to provide a symbolic feel to the images as if they are intended as icons or pictograms rather than literal images.
It may be they did that to make it easier to convey a story or social rankings to the uneducated masses. If you want to show a sequence or social rankings, for example, then perspective tends to get in the way because it would hide or "distort" the importance or order of things because it's affected by physical location rather than symbolic "location" in rank or time.
Look at a typical Windows desktop: the icons are rather flat and/or half-hazard in their perspective because they are not intended to mirror reality as their primary goal. (Well, okay, MS does lack art talent also :-)
Similarly, Sunday paper cartoons tend to down-play perspective because they are tuned to show a story, not a physical scene. Parts that help tell a story, such as faces, eyes, mouths, and hands are often bigger than normal relative to the rest of the body.
But, I do agree with your general premise that the purpose of art changes over time or per culture and it heavily affects the style.
It's also interesting that after camera technology become wide-spread, then the art of the day resorted to being more symbolic (cubism, impressionism, etc.). This is because cameras made realism a cheap commodity such that (well-done) symbolism was the new status symbol and difference maker.