The Cave Painters: The World In Their Hands

“Of the two periods represented in the cave, the older, from about 27,000 years ago, consists entirely of finger tracings on the walls and stencils of hands (196).”

 (Lascaux)

As I read chapter 9, A Passage Underwater; The Skull on a Rock, I found myself slowing down on page 196 where Gregory Curtis began discussing the evidence of hand stencils. I couldn’t understand why less than two pages in this entire book focused on the stenciled hands. Here was the most delicate evidence of human being presence. I know someone else is reading this now, thinking ‘she’s crazy’. But while not in the presence of the paintings as a whole, these outlines of prehistoric peoples’ hands are what speak to me. It was the pictures and the thought of these stenciled hands that allowed the reality to truly resonate with me. These people where really here; tens of thousands of years ago. Seeing those negatives relayed a positive answer. That’s when I began to wonder on my own. What were they like? I began to imagine what they were thinking as they outlined their hands with paint. Curiously, many hands have “missing fingers”. Curtis explains that some scholars believed in reasons such as ritual mutilation, frostbite, debilitating diseases, or extreme malnutrition. As he points out, the thumb always appears. No causes such as the last three would spare the thumb every time. And in disproving rituals, experiments have shown they were created by folding down a specific finger or fingers. Scholars now generally agree that it marks some type of code. And that is where it’s left off in the book. So I ventured off to do my own probing. 

 I can believe that the hand stencils more than likely symbolize a code. A code hypothesis could be supported by the claim that the human hand also had a role in language formation, which, as Curtis explains, was preceded by the ability to communicate only by gestures and signs. Max Raphael’s opinion that the basis of composition in all Paleolithic painting is the hand is supported by “the fact that the hunters used the hand as a means of communication in order to avoid frightening their prey by shouts … (132)” Using the “golden ratio” of the hand to paint animals was aesthetically derived from a magical significance. Maybe Henri Breuil could have argued that the hand symbols marked the gestures of the hunters to aid his hunting-magic hypothesis. 

I may be biased, because I’ve always had a strange fascination with hands, but maybe the painters weren’t just marking the walls with a code. They must have acknowledged the importance of their hands and how it made them distinct from other animals, stirring fascination. Our opposable thumbs give us the ability to grasp things, throw things, and thrust weapons, and our thumbs stretch farther across our hands than any other primate. Max Raphael states that the “hand was the organ by which erectly walking man could translate the superiority of his consciousness over the animal’s thinking capacity into practice (131).” He believed it was the “instrument of domination”. The stencil code-theory is purely logical, but it could be argued that it was inspired by a fascination with the human hand and its significance. I’m sure that if I were to stand face to face with the Paleolithic cave paintings of animals, I would be less distracted by the hand paintings. However the hands link the drawings to their artists and resemble something very unique about our species. I believe they will always leave me with a sense of connectedness to these ancient ancestors.