Cave paintings of mutilated hands could be a Stone Age sign language

DEEP wrong Gargas cave successful the Pyrenees mountains of confederate France is thing that has puzzled each visitant who has made the travel into its acheronian interior chambers. Among prehistoric paintings and engravings of horses, bison and mammoths are hundreds of stencils made tens of thousands of years agone by radical spitting reddish and achromatic overgarment implicit their outstretched hands. Such motifs are found astatine past sites astir the world, from Australia to the Americas and from Indonesia to Europe. For years, archaeologists person wondered astatine their meaning. But those successful Gargas are particularly mysterious due to the fact that astir fractional of the hands look to beryllium injured.

“It’s precise evident that immoderate of the fingers are missing,” says Aritz Irurtzun astatine the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) successful Bayonne, France. So-called mutilated hands tin beryllium seen astatine galore different prehistoric stone creation sites, but Gargas cave is the astir striking illustration of this phenomenon.

It has been suggested that these missing fingers are the effect of accidents, frostbite oregon ritual mutilation. Another anticipation is that their creators deliberately folded distant their fingers to nutrient circumstantial patterns. Irurtzun and Ricardo Etxepare, besides astatine CNRS, person present recovered a mode to trial this idea. What they person discovered convinces them that Gargas’s manus stencils bespeak a Stone Age motion language. If so, these patterns adhd to a increasing assemblage of grounds suggesting that Palaeolithic cave paintings whitethorn incorporate a assortment of hidden codes. The Gargas stencils could adjacent correspond the oldest …