There were no circular saws in the Upper Paleolithic, and even an accidental blow with a hand ax does not easily cut off a finger. However, paleoanthropologists have so far preferred prosaic explanations for an observation that can be made in many of the 25,000-year-old cave paintings in France and Spain: These show handprints or outlines in which one or more fingers or parts of them are missing. The result of some illness, perhaps frostbite or accidents? Not necessarily, says a team of researchers led by archaeologist Mark Collard from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby near Vancouver, Canada – and now offered a scary alternative explanation at the conference of the European Society for Human Evolution.
“There is compelling evidence that these people had their fingers intentionally amputated in rituals to obtain help from supernatural beings,” Collard told the Guardian. He is repeating a thesis that he and his team first formulated a few years ago, but which was rather rejected by experts at the time. Their argument, among other things: In the harsh prehistoric times, people with impaired extremities could hardly have survived. Maybe the handprints were just incomplete? Or were there even creative intentions behind it?
With the ritual you demonstrate that you are prepared to suffer for society
Since then, however, Canadian scientists have gathered more evidence. Among other things, they point to more than 200 known prints in which at least one finger is missing. If frostbite had been the main reason for this, corresponding traces should have been found wherever there was severe frost in the Paleolithic. In fact, the damaged hand images are erratically concentrated in a few caves in France and Spain. Evidence of local cultural practices?
According to the researchers led by Mark Collard, this would be supported by a systematic search in ethnographic databases. There they found a total of 121 societies in which fingers and phalanges were severed for ritual reasons – up to the present day. “This practice appears to have been developed independently many times,” the researchers reported, all over the world. They found four locations in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, six in Asia. This ritual can still be found today, for example among the indigenous Dani people in New Guinea.
“Women sometimes have one or more fingers cut off there after the death of a loved one, including a son or daughter,” explains Collard. “We believe that Europeans did the same thing in the Paleolithic period.” Even though there may have been various belief systems behind it, there is probably one common denominator in all physical sacrifices: the ritual is used to demonstrate that one is prepared to suffer for the community. This gives you the right to belong to it.
However, experts remain skeptical about the new amputation hypothesis of cave art. “Ethnographic comparisons are not sufficient to explain observations in the older Stone Age,” warns prehistoric and early historian Andreas Pastoors from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. One should not hastily throw all the findings and findings of one category, in this case hands, into one pot and provide them with an explanation. From his point of view, the theory would be taken seriously if recurring patterns in individual individuals and matching human finger bones with cut marks had been found in one or two caves.