Prehistoric shamans used to mark the transition from the real world to the spirit world, anthropologists think, by blowing pigments around their hands onto cave walls.

These ghostly hand prints, which still dot European caves more than 10,000 years later, now serve a less ethereal purpose — telling scientists how many of those shamans were left-handed.

New research shows that the frequency of left-handed painters — 23 percent — is the same today as it was back then.

The work is a rare look at how left-handedness has persisted for millennia, says Charlotte Faurie, the French graduate student who performed the research. It suggests no evolutionary disadvantage to being a lefty, as some scientists had thought.

There’s older evidence that lefties were at work almost as soon as Homo sapiens arose: Wear marks on stone artifacts may signify the presence of southpaws 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals also had their share of lefties; some of their fossilized teeth carry telltale marks that indicate left-handed eating practices, Faurie says.

Such evidence is rare and doesn’t allow scientists to estimate the frequency of left-handedness. That’s why Faurie turned to a database, compiled by Marc Groenen of the Free University of Brussels, of prehistoric hand prints.

In caves stretching across France and Spain, Groenen identified 507 “negative hands,” in which pigment was splattered around a hand by blowing through a tube, spitting, or daubing the paint. Oddly, such negative prints are much more common than positive hand prints in which the palm was painted and pressed against a surface, Groenen says.

By taking careful measurements, Groenen often could identify the age and gender of the person who made the negative hand. In 343 cases, he could determine the handedness of the artist; somebody holding the pigment tube in his or her left hand presumably would have made the imprint of a right hand. Groenen found that 79 prints were of right negative hands, suggesting that 23 percent of the cave artists were left-handed.

Faurie thinks the European caves represent a fair sampling of the number of lefties back then. Some of the hand prints are large and some are small; others are higher or lower on the wall.


View: Full Article | Source: The State