Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art.
In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone.
In the past, this absence of digits was attributed to artistic licence by the cave-painting creators or to ancient people’s real-life medical problems, including frostbite.
But scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be far more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” said Collard.
Hands are actually pretty easy to injure, and modern medicine is the reason most of us get to keep them all our lives. I’ve known enough farmers and construction workers who are missing digits to assume a significant number are likely to be from injury in agricultural or hunting contexts. Frostbite would be another easy source of injury depending on climate.
While I could see a possible religious practice coming out of reverence for injured hands contributing too, this seems like the age old archeology practice of assuming anything is intentionally done for religious reasons if they don’t have a neat and tidy singular explanation.
Yeah it’s more likely it was a realistic depiction of real life where people would be randomly missing some fingers