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75% of Cave Art Created by Women

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Carlin Ross

When Betty was a strugging artist in New York, she would sit in Cedars and argue with Jackson Pollack, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg that women could be famous artists. They disagreed and challenged Betty to name one female artist of any note.

Well it seems that women were the original artists.

Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University began studying early cave art after discovering the work of John Manning, a British biologist who had found that men and women's fingers have different relative lengths.

Snow dusted off a 40-year-old book about cave paintings and found a picture of a colorful hand stencil from the famous Pech Merle cave in southern France.

"I looked at that thing and I thought, man, if Manning knows what he's talking about, then this is almost certainly a female hand."

He created an algorithm using a reference set of hands from people of European descent and determined that 75% of cave art was created by female hands.

Many doubt Snow's research but why wouldn't women play a larger role in prehistoric society?  Doesn't it make sense that if the men were off hunting the women would be painting their hands in the caves?