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

DEEP inside Gargas cave within the Pyrenees mountains of southern France is one thing that has puzzled each customer who has made the journey into its darkish inside chambers. Amongst prehistoric work and engravings of horses, bison and mammoths are lots of of stencils made tens of hundreds of years in the past by folks spitting crimson and black paint over their outstretched arms. Such motifs are discovered at historical websites world wide, from Australia to the Americas and from Indonesia to Europe. For years, archaeologists have questioned at their that means. However these in Gargas are particularly mysterious as a result of round half of the arms seem like injured.

“It’s very apparent that a number of the fingers are lacking,” says Aritz Irurtzun on the Nationwide Centre for Scientific Analysis (CNRS) in Bayonne, France. So-called mutilated arms could be seen at many different prehistoric rock artwork websites, however Gargas cave is essentially the most putting instance of this phenomenon.

It has been instructed that these lacking fingers are the results of accidents, frostbite or ritual mutilation. One other chance is that their creators intentionally folded away their fingers to provide particular patterns. Irurtzun and Ricardo Etxepare, additionally at CNRS, have now discovered a strategy to take a look at this concept. What they’ve found convinces them that Gargas’s hand stencils mirror a Stone Age signal language. In that case, these patterns add to a rising physique of proof suggesting that Palaeolithic cave work might comprise a wide range of hidden codes. The Gargas stencils may even symbolize the oldest …