The evidence: maybe!!
The evidence: Made up!
To be fair when it comes to this kind of research comparison with modern hunter gatherer societies is the closest thing you can find to evidence, some things never enter the archaeological record.
Perhaps we'll never find conclusive evidence pointing to any one of the theories on these missing-finger handprints.
Right. With no written documentation or known modern descendants of the culture, it's all speculation. I don't know why they'd leap to conclude it was intentional religious sacrifice vs. accidents or amputations following injury.
The frostbite theory sounds more reasonable to me.
A family friend sacrificed part of her finger as a child. This was as a Hindu, and happened in the Indus river.
OR - now bear with me here... OR one or more fingers were curled under when the tracing was made for reasons we can't comprehend.
Maybe it was some ancient numbering system, or an attempt at a calendar. There's really no way to know.
Or my favorite is it's the equivalent to the middle finger.
Ancient live long and prosper.
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
Flintknapping is extremely prone to finger and hand injuries, and nobody understood infection back then. Probably everyone was making and using stone tools constantly. Might explain things.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
“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.
In a paper presented at the European Society conference, they said their latest research provided even more convincing evidence that the removal of digits to appease deities explains the hand images in the caves in France and Spain.
Collard pointed to rituals still carried out in Mauritius and other places, such as fire-walking, face-piercing with skewers and putting hooks through skin so a person can haul heavy chains behind them.
The original article contains 663 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think it is a relatively new phenomena where it isn't a regular thing to lose a portion of a digit.
Also in a similar level of inquiry these researchers are engaging in: the guy who lost a finger wrestling a coyote is also likely to be the one to tell that story.
"Oh no middle finger guy? Yeah I know that story. It was coming right at him."
I used to work at a zoo and a lot of the older keepers had a finger or part missing to some animal or another back when health and safety was less, used to be common in factories too, Tony Iommi lost bits in a factory and has spoken about how it wasn't that unusual.
Or we've evolved another finger since then! 😁
Fossil record says no
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
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