Amir D. Aczel by The Cave & the Cathedral

Author:The Cave & the Cathedral [Cave, The & Cathedral, the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-11-08T00:45:56+00:00

14

The Sign of the Hand

EARLY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A STRANGE CAVE was discovered in the central part of the French Pyrenees, not far from Lourdes. At this cave, called Gargas, almost all of the prehistoric art consisted of images of human hands, in red and black—some “negatives,” stenciled hand images created by splashing paint around hands held to the cave wall, and others obtained by smearing hands with paint and stamping images on the walls.

The hand images found here are similar to the few hands found at Pech Merle. The art at Pech Merle was dated to about the Last Glacial Maximum (22,000 years ago). But Gargas is an even older cave. We now know from radiocarbon analysis that the art in this cave is far more ancient—it is of the same period as the Chauvet cave, 31,000 to 27,000 years ago.

Images of hands were found in the deep recesses of this cave, and, in particular, one was placed in a natural niche in the cave, while others were tilted at various angles. These hands were of various sizes; some hands had belonged to men and women and others to children. Some hands appeared to be mutilated—lacking certain fingers. Henri Breuil developed a theory to address this mystery. He hypothesized a Cro-Magnon cult of mutilation.

But why were there so many hands at Gargas, and why were they all of different sizes, belonging to both men and women and with different numbers of fingers showing? No one had an answer to this riddle, but a recent analysis revealed that Breuil may have been wrong. An experiment was carried out, showing that normal hands could have been drawn in such a way as to match images in this cave—without their actually being mutilated. This, of course, does not prove that the hands in the Gargas prints were not mutilated or otherwise missing fingers.

Yet the idea of mutilation in a society that depended on able-bodied people for hunting and gathering is bizarre. And at Gargas, many hands appear mutilated. One competing theory is that the cold weather of the Ice Age caused frequent frostbite, which then led to lost fingers, rather than active mutilation.1 This is certainly a plausible hypothesis, although, as experiments have shown, perhaps bent fingers were used here to create a code, and none of the fingers were actually mutilated. It should be noted that hands that appear mutilated have been found only in Gargas; the hands that made prints in other caves appear to have been intact.

The most promising theory was proposed by André Leroi-Gourhan in his seminal treatise, Le fil du temps (The Thread of Time), first published in 1957 (and reissued in 1983). It explained the mysterious code that he believed was the purpose of the hand signs at Gargas. The following analysis is based on Leroi-Gourhan’s results.2

Leroi-Gourhan rejected Breuil’s hypothesis that there was some kind of ritual mutilation of people’s hands. He argued that the variety and the kinds of missing or deformed fingers make the hypothesis unlikely.

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