#finger fluting

We have been finger painting since the beginning!

Was the title of the email my boyfriend sent to me.

He forwarded a short article to me, knowing my love of anthropology, about some interesting finds in a cave system in France. I'll get to it in a minute. France has a TON of cave paintings (so does Spain, you guys), the oldest of which is found in Chaveut (dates back to the Upper Paleolithic). Archaeologists first thought that perhaps cave paintings were done to decorate their living spaces, like you or I would hang a Klimpt print from Ikea in our living room. But in most of the caves that boast these paintings, there is very little evidence of people having lived there. There are a huge variety of different styles of painting, such as painting with natural pigments, carving into the stone itself creating silhouettes, or tracing with fingers (called finger fluting) directly into the soft silt lining of the walls.

There are a number of current theories on cave paintings, but I have a few favorites. Henri Breuil suggested that the paintings, depicting large animals being felled by humans, were a sort of hunting magic. "If you paint it, they will come" sort of thing. This is pretty interesting because history suggests that they DIDN'T hunt large animals. Being in such small bands meant that they had to protect their members to protect their livelihood. If they went after a large animal, it might kill three or four of their men.

There's also Guthrie, who suggests that these artworks and the venus figures might be the fantasies of adolescent men, who made up quite a large percentage of their small bands. Men are expected to fantasize about great deeds, good hunts, and big tits. This would be a compelling theory if it weren't for Dean Snow of PSU, who determined through analysis of hand print size that a portion of these paintings and figures were created by women.

Probably my favorite theory is the one proposed by David Lewis-Williams who suggested that the works might have been done by Paleolithic shamans who took drugs and painted their images while in a trance state. During this time, it was likely that they had already figured out some forms of natural medicines... and their need to forage to survive probably meant trying a number of different plants and roots. It's more that likely that they'd accidentally discovered one or many hallucinogenic plants.

So that being said, here's the article.

The finger flutings (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) in the Rouffignac cave system were analyzed in terms of size and distance in relation to each other. They were determined to have been produced by children, probably aged 3-7. Here's the problem: the flutings are too high up for a child to have reached, and they are way too steady for a child to have produced. So what does that mean? Probably that they were ENCOURAGED to draw on the walls by their parents... held on shoulders to reach, and their parents might have guided their hands. And what does THAT mean? In my opinion, it suggests that cave paintings may have been a teaching device. "This big thing is a buffalo. Now you try."

The first paragraph of the Huffington Post's article on this is hilarious: "It all started when a Cambridge archaeologist looked at a cave drawing in the French caverns at Rouffignac and thought "my 3 year old could do this." Turns out she was right."

Here's a couple other sources, if you're interested.