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National Geographic broke the story this week:
Were the First Artists Mostly Women?
Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma.
As it happens, I teach at Berkeley, where this supposed "dogma" was overturned decades ago by Margaret Conkey and her students. But leaving aside the lag in popular media awareness, what have we learned from this latest study?
Dean Snow used finger length/hormone correlations as a basis to identify different hand stencils as likely made by female artists, citing an argument that "women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men's ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers". Snow previously published a pilot project assessing six hand stencils; the new study expands the sample to 32 hand stencils from three caves.
Research on digit ratios is actually a bit more complicated than the media acknowledges. The basic argument starts with observed effects of prenatal hormones on developing infants. As summarized by the BBC,
Some scientists believe that the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length indicates how much testosterone we were exposed to in our mother's womb.
The caution expressed by the BBC is due to the fact that most studies on human digit ratios are based on correlations between sex and digit ratio. There are animal studies that actually demonstrate how prenatal exposure to testosterone affects finger length. One study of mice led the BBC to conclude that, if these results hold for humans,
finger length can be almost a "readout" of a person's hormonal balance during a very narrow window of development in the womb.
That "readout" reflects individual biological development, where there can be significant differences between developing fetuses of the same genital sex. There is notable variation between populations as well. So this is a noisy signal.
The newly reported research itself shows intriguing differences between the modern baseline population and the inferred Palaeolithic population. National Geographic described the issue:
Snow ran the numbers through an algorithm that he had created based on a reference set of hands from people of European descent who lived near his university. Using several measurements—such as the length of the fingers, the length of the hand, the ratio of ring to index finger, and the ratio of index finger to little finger—the algorithm could predict whether a given handprint was male or female. 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.
In the hand stencils from the Palaeolithic caves, in contrast, Snow found two very clear groups of hands with different digit ratios:
there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.
"They fall at the extreme ends, and even beyond the extreme ends," Snow said.
Based on this highly dimorphic population, Snow concluded that 75% of the hand prints he studied were made by women.
Research on the possible sex of Palaeolithic artists using digit ratios and other indications of hand size has been going on at least since 2006, when Snow published his first article, simultaneous with work by a French archaeological team working in Indonesia.
The picture that emerges when you review all of this literature is not uniform: arguments have been made for participation in producing the art by adult men and women, boys and girls, in different proportions in each study.
Archaeologists working in Indonesia reported in 2006 that almost equal numbers of men and women were involved in creating hand prints there, using digit ratios as their guide. They identified six distinct individuals who participated in making highly patterned designs using hand prints.
Their research goes furthest in proposing differences in participation by gender, showing planning in the placement of sets of handprints, with men and women forming designs in different locations and different ways:
Each gender seems organized in a different manner: men rather chose a system based on “succession” or “hierarchy”, while women preferred to paint their hands in a “circuit” or a “path” recalling a spiral.
In December of 2012 Discovery.com described another study that involved estimating sex from characteristics of hands, this time dealing with "finger flutings", "lines drawn with the fingers on soft surfaces". Press attention was caught by the finding that one of those responsible was possibly
a 5-year old girl. The researchers came to this conclusion based not only on her hand dimensions but also on the height of the places where she had been able to reach.
The abstract of the paper, in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, reports that
the profiles of the flutings of seven individuals... show that two are probably male whereas the remaining five are probably female.
In it's coverage of Dean Snow's most recent work, the National Geographic quoted an opposing researcher, evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie, who previously did his own study based on different characteristics of hand size, and came to a strikingly different conclusion:
His work—based mostly on differences in the width of the palm and the thumb—found that the vast majority of handprints came from adolescent boys.
Guthrie added a pungent projection onto the past of modern attitudes to support his argument:
For adults, caves would have been dangerous and uninteresting, but young boys would have explored them for adventure ... "They drew what was on their mind, which is mainly two things: naked women and large, frightening mammals."
Guthrie's characterization of the themes of Palaeolithic cave art, painting in particular, isn't convincing, at least for sites in France. Human representations there are rare (reported to be only about 20 identified complete human figures), and while there are females, males are also found. The animals painted most often in France are horses, not the very large (mammoths) or the very frightening (lions) animals.
Explanations for Palaeolithic cave art aren't notably affected by the findings of who the artists were. It seems to be a case of folding new proposals about the sex and age of artists into existing models, most of which can comfortably accommodate visualization of different artists.
For example, National Geographic balanced Guthrie's comments with those of another researcher, archaeologist Dave Whitley, a proponent of the idea that entering the dark caves of Palaeolithic Europe was a way to induce ritual trances:
Whitley rejects Guthrie's idea that this art was made for purely practical reasons related to hunting. His view is that most of the art was made by shamans who went into trances to try to connect with the spirit world.
The French team working in Indonesia also speculated that the hand prints they documented were evidence of shamanic practice, but in their case emphasized the shaman's role as healer:
The hand stencils themselves evoke traditional healing rituals in which a shaman lays his hands on a sick person, then sprays medicine from his mouth onto the patient to cure him.
Whitley adds a twist to the basic framework of studies of hands and sexual identity, by introducing the idea that there could have been more than two genders in Palaeolithic society:
in some hunter-gatherer societies shamans are female or even transgendered.
All of the research using hand shape and digit ratios to try to identify participation by artists of different sexes takes a two sex model for granted. If Palaeolithic societies were composed of people who didn't identify with two fixed genders based on two sexes, then the results of these research projects would need to be re-examined.
Media headlines for stories about Snow's report tend to assume the goal is to assign artwork as a gendered activity. Headlines reading "female artists were responsible for the majority of Palaeolithic art" ignore the fact that hand prints are just one kind of marking, and those who made them may not be the same as those who painted the animals and rare human images.
They also misrepresent Snow's findings, which showed that 75% of the artists had the hand ratio he defines as female-- meaning 25% didn't. If we add into the mix the other studies using digit ratios, we find that people identified as male and female, adults and children, were involved, in different proportions in specific times and places.
That for me is what should be the takeaway point: Paleolithic art making was not reserved to a small number of people. While modern observers may have needed digit ratios to be convinced that some of these artists were women, that by itself is not the most interesting conclusion, especially for a society whose perception of gender is largely inaccessible.
If we take Whitley's point that transgender people (some of them of female genital sex) are not uncommon in contemporary societies that provided the models for studies proposing cave use and art was related to shamanic practice, then knowing what hormonal sex past artists had doesn't do a lot for us: we need to understand how sex was perceived in terms of social genders.
And of course, the obsession with scoring the girls vs. boys in prehistory sidesteps the most important question of all:
The question Snow gets most often, though, is why these ancient artists, whoever they were, left handprints at all.
"I have no idea, but a pretty good hypothesis is that this is somebody saying, 'This is mine, I did this'."
Maybe we need to work on that answer first. And it isn't going to come from measuring digit ratios.
