14 DAY TRIAL // Archaeologist Dean Snow, now working with the Pennsylvania State University, is quite convinced that most of the ancient cave paintings that have been discovered in various parts of the world over the years were created not by men, but by women.
Should his claims be true to facts, this means that women were the world's earliest artists.
What's more, the fact that women created the majority of these paintings, which are believed to be 12-40,000 years old, would leave the scientific community with no choice except rethink women's role in prehistoric society.
Daily Mail tells us that Dean Snow first began to suspect that an overwhelming number of cave paintings were created by women about a decade ago, when he chanced to read a study by British biologist John Manning.
In this study, the biologist explained that, according to evidence at hand, men and women's fingers had different relative lengths, the same source details.
Based on this piece of information, the archaeologist and his colleagues set out to reexamine prehistoric cave paintings and found that 75% of them were highly unlikely to have been created by men.
“Much recent research into the sexual identities of the makers of prehistoric handprints and hand stencils simply assumed that males made them. Recent research by Snow, however, provided evidence that females also actively participated in the cave art,” archaeologists with the Pennsylvania State University write in a recent paper.
Furthermore, “His initial research showed that among six hand stencils found in caves in France, four could be identified as female hands. Research in additional caves, supported by the National Geographic Society, confirmed with a larger sample that females probably made a majority (75%) of the hand stencils.”
Interestingly enough, it was only a few years ago when evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie also took the time to analyze cave paintings dating back to Paleolithic times, and concluded that they must have been made by teenagers.
“They drew what was on their mind, which is mainly two things: naked women and large, frightening mammals,” the biologist stated at that time.