Cave Paintings May Contain Codes
The Foresight of Our Paleolithic Ancestors:
Ancient Cave Paintings Suggest Messaging
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
Ancient cave paintings are found at sites from Australia to the Americas, Indonesia to Europe, and everywhere in between. Our claimed evolutionary ancestors clearly loved art, and their paintings have left us a fairly good picture of their world and culture.[1] The paintings include those things that were important to them, such as other humans,[2] horses, bison, woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, and boats.[3]
Cave art in Chauvet, France (right) is among the finest ever discovered. Compare it to work by Cezanne (left)
Hand prints: More than art?
It is no surprise that one common object that was painted was the human hand. Walk through any elementary school, as I did last month, and you will note the many pictures of hands taped on the walls painted by the young artists, some with real talent. Most are hand stencils made by putting one’s hand on the paper and drawing around it with a crayon. Another technique, called ‘positive prints,’ is made by daubing the hand with paint, then pressing it against a paper.
Of the thousands of hand prints pictured on caves by our Paleolithic ancestors, one set is very unusual—those painted on the walls of a cave in Gargas, France. They are unusual because around half of the hands appear to be injured. Mutilated hands can occasionally be seen at many other prehistoric rock art sites, but the Gargas cave is the most striking example of this art form. At this site, 114 of the 231 hand images are missing at least part of one finger.
The purpose and meaning of what evolutionists call “prehistoric” hand drawings have puzzled researchers for over a century. Paleolithic hand stencils with missing fingers could indicate ritual mutilation or frostbite, but new research suggests that this explanation is not likely.[4] Amputation could explain some Stone Age hand stencils in the Gargas cave, except that no missing fingers exist for any of the positive hand prints in the prehistoric European cave art. Positive hand prints, as defined above, were made by covering the hand with paint, then pressing it against the cave wall, leaving a definite hand print, even including some finger-palm prints. This observation appears to rule out both the mutilation idea and the possibility that fingers were lost to frostbite or accidents.[5] How old these prints are “remains uncertain because establishing the age of prehistoric cave art is notoriously challenging.”[6]
Cave paintings could be a ‘Stone Age’ sign language
New research supports the idea that the prints are not random child’s play made by illiterate primitive prehistoric cave men as once thought, but rather they were a deliberate effort to communicate to other persons. George writes in support of this new idea:
While these stencils might look like mere doodles to the untrained eye, they are often found deep in caves in hard-to-reach places, suggesting that they had some special significance. “They’re not just someone accidentally slapping their hand on a wall …Going deep into the cave, with the painting material and carrying a torch or lamp…. it has to be something really profound for them.[7]
American Sign Language (ASL) symbols using the hand to spell the alphabet. (Wikimedia Commons)
In view of the fact that use of finger signals is a common means of communication even today, this is a good possibility. Signing for the deaf is an excellent example. Since only two dimensions of three-dimensional hands can be pictured on cave walls, examples which used bent fingers may only look like the finger was shorter, or that the person lost part of his finger. The missing fingers may represent hidden fingers tucked under the palm of the hand.
Thus, researchers believe that prehistoric artists deliberately drew them this way to communicate something. University of Coimbra (Portugal) professor Hipόlito Giraldo, suggests that the finger drawings that appear to have missing digits could be “indicators of danger, orientation signs, group identity symbols or markers of hidden goods in the cave.”[8]
Award-winning New Scientist science writer and features editor Alison George adds that this is not
the first time researchers have suggested that Stone Age cave paintings might contain a hidden code. Among stunning depictions of mammoths and bison, there are many graphic marks, ranging from simple lines, dots and triangles to complex configurations, such as ladders and feather shapes called penniforms. Genevieve von Petzinger at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal, has made a comprehensive catalogue of these signs from caves in Europe and has found that the Stone Age people living there had a repertoire of 32 different ones. What’s more, some of these symbols are found in caves throughout the world. Certain signs, including disks and hand stencils, are often found close together, and such combinations are of great interest for understanding the origins of writing. After all, combinations of just 26 letters of the Latin alphabet encode the vast amount of information of the English language.[9]
Over a century ago, anthropologist Walter Roth observed that Queensland First Nations communities in Australia used a sign language that has parallels with depictions of hands in the rock art of the region. A fist with only the little finger outstretched was the sign that small caterpillars or grubs could be found in certain places. To test whether the motifs in the Gargas cave represent a sign language, Irurtzun and Etxepare engaged
a system used to analyze the ease with which the gestures employed in alternate sign languages can be made. By considering the physiology of the hand and forearm, they rated each of the patterns of the hand stencils on the cave wall. If these were random, and made with the support of a surface, you would expect 32 different permutations. Instead, there are just 10, all of which can be made in the air, suggesting that they correspond to particular hand gestures. Moreover, shapes that can’t be made in the air but only against a surface, aren’t seen in Gargas – or anywhere else. “We don’t find evidence of hand stencils that would be impossible in sign language,” says Irurtzun.[10]
A set of common 3-D hand signals which can be used when only two dimensions are possible, such as in the art on cave walls. Instead of bending the figures as shown in this picture, the cave art could represent the pictures by appearing to have lost part of the finger. (Wikimedia Commons)
Many societies today, including ours, use a wide range of symbolic hand gestures on the job at work, in the military, when hunting and traveling, when storytelling, and during rituals along with – and sometimes in place of – their spoken language.
These “alternate” sign languages sometimes function as a common language, (called a lingua franca), between speakers whose native languages are different, and between cultures that do not share the same spoken language. The ability to “identify an individual artist and tell whether it was a modern human or Neanderthal, a man or a woman” is information that can tell us a great deal about the one responsible for the hand depictions.[11] In fact, to correct George, Neanderthals are now recognized as a variant of modern humans–Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, not a different species.
George adds one insightful analysis that supports
claims to have decoded the meaning of some of these symbols. Ben Bacon, an independent researcher based in London, worked with Pettitt and others to analyze dots and “Y” shapes found close to depictions of animals …. a sort of hunting calendar to record the behavior of prey, with the number of marks seeming to record an animal’s mating season in months after the beginning of spring, and a Y denoting the month it gave birth.[12]
Summary
This research continues the trend to document that so-called primitive Paleolithic cave dwellers were more like modern humans than envisioned even just a few years ago. In other words, we have more evidence that these individuals were biologically modern humans with intelligence comparable to ours.
References
[1] George, Alison. Messages from the Stone Age. New Scientist, pp. 39-42, 18-24 March 2023.
[2] Aubert, Maxime, et al. Paleolithic cave art in Borneo. Nature 264 (7735):254-258, 7 November 2018.
[3] Strickland, Ashley. Oldest figurative artwork found in a cave that’s full of surprises, CNN Health—Space+Science; https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/07/world/oldest-figurative-art-borneo-cave/index.html, 7 November 2018.
[4] George, Alison. Paleolithic hand stencils with missing fingers could indicate ritual mutilation or frostbite – but new research suggests they might be trying to tell us something. New Scientist 257:38-42; https://www.newscientist.com/author/alison-george/, 15 March 2023.
[5] George, 2023.
[6] George, 2023, p. 42.
[7] George, 2023, p. 39.
[8] George, 2023, p. 40.
[9] George, 2023, p. 41.
[10] George, 2023, p. 41.
[11] George, 2023, p. 41
[12] George, 2023, pp. 41-42.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.