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Women & cave art

32 replies

ArabellaScott · 19/09/2020 22:45

It's been found fairly recently that 75% of cave art was made by women, challenging the accepted idea of cave artists being predominantly male.

As far as I know, previously hand/thumb ratio had been analysed, seems that recently fingerprints have been analysed to asses the sex and age of the artists.

www.theartnewspaper.com/news/fingerprints-help-identify-prehistoric-painters

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Original poster
ArabellaScott · 20/09/2020 07:48

Woah, Edna, thank you, I hadn't heard of these caves! The Chamber Of Vulvas - amazing.

www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/engravings-female-genitalia-may-be-worlds-oldest-cave-art

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HeirloomTomato · 20/09/2020 07:42

Interesting to hear there is finally some proof of this. I had always wondered, even as a child, why we were supposed to assume that ancient cave artists were male just because the animals they drew were large animals that were typically hunted. Now we have some proof that the artists weren't always male. Why would they have been? This always struck me as us projecting our own contemporary social roles backward onto the past rather than any factual representation of the past.

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ArabellaScott · 20/09/2020 07:41

Dreeple, tbh I think the underlying reasoning is that only men are capable of doing anything of any significance - and default male thinking, too.

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EvilEdna1 · 19/09/2020 23:48

I went to see some cave paintings in Northern Spain and one section of cave was devoted to vulvas. The guide only spoke Spanish which I don't speak do no idea what was going on.

Dreeple · 19/09/2020 23:31

Still don’t get why anyone thought the artists had to be male.

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ArabellaScott · 19/09/2020 23:14

As far as I know, it went roughly 'pictures were of animals and hunters, males were hunters, ergo artists must have been male'.

This is off of wikipedia: 'Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as hunting magic to increase the abundance of prey.'

'R. Dale Guthrie ...hypothesizes that the main themes in the paintings and other artifacts (powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and the representation of women in the Venus figurines) are the work of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of the human population at the time.[23][verification needed] However, in analyzing hand prints and stencils in French and Spanish caves, Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University has proposed that a proportion of them, including those around the spotted horses in Pech Merle, were of female hands.[24] '

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

I have got what looks like a brilliant book on cave art, that is on my teetering to-read pile (The Mind in the Cave). Maybe I'll crack it out!

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ErrolTheDragon · 19/09/2020 22:58

That's interesting.
...challenging the accepted idea of cave artists being predominantly male.

Do you have any idea why that was have been the 'accepted idea' - was it based on any evidence or at least plausible theories or, well, just because of a default assumption of men doing all the interesting and important stuff?