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Dean Snow is an emeritus professor at Penn State University and has spent the last ten years poring over data on cave paintings between 20 thousand and 40 thousand years old. The Huffington Post reports that he used the measurements of ancient cave handprints and concluded that about three quarters of those he found were left by females.
Snow got the idea from research which found that female hands have ring and index fingers of about the same length, while male ring fingers are generally longer than their indexes.
Snow said he examined hundreds of handprints over the years but has found only 32 in Spain and France that were useable for his study. Of these, Snow was able to use ratio measurements to differentiate between male and female handprints. Thus, he concluded 24 of the 32 hands were female.
He believes his findings have also busted a few myths about the gender roles in pre-historic times.
Speaking to National Geographic, Snow said: “the fact that men did most of the hunting does not necessarily mean they were the only ones handling animals. It's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are."
However, not everyone is bowled over by Snow’s findings … evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie carried out different analyses on cave handprints and believe most had been made by adolescent boys.
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Snow got the idea from research which found that female hands have ring and index fingers of about the same length, while male ring fingers are generally longer than their indexes.
Snow said he examined hundreds of handprints over the years but has found only 32 in Spain and France that were useable for his study. Of these, Snow was able to use ratio measurements to differentiate between male and female handprints. Thus, he concluded 24 of the 32 hands were female.
He believes his findings have also busted a few myths about the gender roles in pre-historic times.
Speaking to National Geographic, Snow said: “the fact that men did most of the hunting does not necessarily mean they were the only ones handling animals. It's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are."
However, not everyone is bowled over by Snow’s findings … evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie carried out different analyses on cave handprints and believe most had been made by adolescent boys.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
