The World's First Art May Have Been Done By Caveladies, Not Cavemen

Dean Snow, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, analyzed hand stencils found in eight caves in France and Spain. He compared finger length to determine that three-quarters of the handprints were from ladies. You see, most of the cave paintings show hands with equal length ring and index fingers, which is most common in women, especially during Paleolithic times.

“There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,” said Snow, whose research was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. “People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why.”

Some experts are skeptical — believing that the majority of handprints were made by adolescent boys — but many believe that this is a landmark contribution, noting that “this is the first time anyone’s synthesized a good body of evidence.”