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Let’s Talk Trash!
©2017 The Keenan Group, Inc
It is the HAND that separated man from the rest of animal-kind , in the sense that it allowed man to eventually step out of the natural processes of evolution and natural selection. It allowed man to make things as well as also allowed him to take as much as he wants. We know already the kinds of destruction that man can wreak on our world. It is the hand that makes us different, not better, for in it is our own undoing, and the world’s. Yet, it is also the hand that reaches out in the cave paintings of Pech- Merle to make a bridge between human and horse. Our hands don’t look very different from a chimp’s. But beneath the outer structure, our hands are muscled — especially our thumbs, which rotate in a complete circle in their sockets, able to make precise, firm contact with each finger- pad. The combination of flexibility, strength and precision of the human grip, palms, forearms and fingertips, is so complicated that it caused a total overhaul, or re-working, of a large part of our mammal brains in order to make it all work. The nervous system had to change a lot in order to respond to each new need and action of the hand — from the overhand throw of a rock to the flint-knapping of an obsidian blade to the incredibly difficult and precise act of threading a fishbone needle. Or, more literally, they evolved together — hand, nervous system, brain.
Were the First Artists Mostly Women? Three-quarters of handprints in ancient cave art Handprints in ancient cave art most often belonged to women, overturning the prevailing thoughts that the earliest artists were all men. Photograph courtesy Dean Snow Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new research of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were mostly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological knowledge. Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University studied hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. Archaeologists have found hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls across the world. Because many of these early paintings also showcase game animals—bison, reindeer, horses, woolly mammoths—many researchers have proposed that they were made by male hunters, perhaps to chronicle their kills or as some kind of “hunting magic” to improve success of an upcoming hunt. The new study suggests otherwise. “In most hunter-gatherer societies, it’s men that do the killing. But it’s often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are just as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are,” Snow said. “It wasn’t just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around.” “Hand stencils are a truly ironic category of cave art because they appear to be such a clear and obvious connection between us and the people of the Paleolithic,” said archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England. “We think we understand them, yet the more you dig into them you realize how lacking our understanding is.” Snow’s study began more than a decade ago when he came across the work of John Manning, a British biologist who had found that men and women differ in the relative lengths of their fingers: Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length; however, men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers. were left by women, study finds. By Virginia Hughes, for National Geographic / PUBLISHED October 9, 2013
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