Gli artisti più antichi? Erano donne? - Were the First Artists Mostly Women?

Gli artisti più antichi? Erano donne

Virginia Hughes, National Geographic 8 Ottobre 2013

Gran parte delle pitture rupestri preistoriche furono realizzate da esponenti del genere femminile: lo rivela una nuova ricerca che ribalta decenni di supposizioni archeologiche

Per molto tempo gli studiosi hanno creduto che i primi paleo-artisti fossero uomini. Ma l'archeologo Dean Snow, docente della Pennsylvania State University, ha analizzato le contro-impronte di mano lasciate sulle pareti di otto grotte francesi e spagnole: confrontando le lunghezze di alcune dita, Snow ha potuto stabilire che tre quarti delle impronte sono state lasciate da mani femminili.

“Per lungo tempo c'è stato un forte pregiudizio maschile nella letteratura scientifica”, ha spiegato Snow, che per i suoi studi ha ricevuto dei fondi dal Committee for Research and Exploration della National Geographic Society. “Molte persone hanno fatto delle supposizioni del tutto immotivate sugli autori di queste opere, e sul perché venivano eseguite”.

Gli archeologi hanno trovato sulle pareti delle grotte di tutto il mondo centinaia di contorni di mani realizzati con la tecnica a stencil. Visto che molte di queste prime pitture sono associate a ritratti di animali da selvaggina, come bisonti, renne, cavalli e mammut lanosi, molti ricercatori hanno avanzato l’ipotesi venissero realizzate dai cacciatori, forse per narrare le loro imprese o come sortilegio per migliorare gli esiti della caccia. La nuova pubblicazione suggerisce proprio il contrario.

“Nella maggior parte delle società di cacciatori - raccoglitori, sono gli uomini che si occupano della caccia, ma molto spesso sono le donne che trasportano le prede al campo, per questo sono molto attente ai risultati della caccia”, ha detto Snow. “Fuori, a caccia di bisonti, non c’erano solo maschi”.

Sono stati espressi molti pareri sui dati diffusi da Snow che confermano, comunque, quanti misteri ancora circondano queste prime espressioni artistiche.

“Gli stencil delle mani sono una categoria davvero ironica nell’arte rupestre, perché ci appaiono come una connessione chiara ed evidente tra noi e il Paleolitico”, ha detto l'archeologo Paul Pettitt dell'Università di Durham. “Crediamo di capire, ma più cerchiamo, più ci rendiamo conto di quanto sia superficiale la nostra comprensione”.

Differenze di sesso

Lo studio di Snow è iniziato più di dieci anni fa quando si è imbattuto nel lavoro di John Manning, un biologo britannico che aveva scoperto che uomini e donne differiscono nelle relative lunghezze delle dita: le donne tendono ad avere anulare e indice della stessa lunghezza, mentre negli uomini l’anulare è più lungo rispetto all’indice.

Un giorno, dopo aver letto gli studi di Manning, Snow ha dato un’occhiata a un vecchio libro di pitture rupestri. Sulla copertina del libro c’era lo stencil colorato di una mano della famosa grotta di Pech Merle nel sud della Francia. “Ho guardato quell’immagine e ho pensato, se veramente Manning sa quel che dice, allora è quasi certamente una mano femminile”, ha raccontato Snow.

Impronte di mano sono state trovate nelle grotte di tutto il mondo, in Argentina, Africa, Borneo e Australia, ma gli esempi più noti e antichi sono le pitture rupestri delle cavità francesi e spagnole, eseguite tra i 40 e i 12 mila anni fa.

Per il suo studio, in uscita sulla rivista American Antiquity, Snow ha esaminato centinaia di stencil di grotte europee, ma la maggior parte erano troppo sbiadite per venire utilizzate nell'analisi. Lo studio include le misure di trentadue stencil, di cui sedici provenienti dalla grotta di El Castillo in Spagna, sei dalle grotte di Gargas e cinque da Pech Merle, entrambe in Francia.

Snow ha elaborato queste misure attraverso un algoritmo creato sulla base di un set di misure di riferimento ricavate dalla mani di persone di discendenza europea che vivono nei pressi della sua università. Utilizzando diverse misurazioni - come la lunghezza delle dita, la lunghezza della mano o il rapporto tra indice e mignolo - l’algoritmo riesce a prevedere se una data impronta appartenga a una mano maschile o femminile. Comunque, vista l’elevata sovrapposizione tra le misure maschili e femminili, l’algoritmo non supera il 60 per cento di precisione. Fortunatamente per Snow, le differenze delle mani preistoriche sono molto più marcate: ”Venti mila anni fa, gli uomini erano uomini e le donne erano donne”.

Donna, ragazzo, sciamano?

L’analisi di Snow ha determinato che 24 delle 32 mani - cioè il 75 per cento - appartenevano a donne.

Alcuni studiosi però rimangono scettici. Qualche anno fa, il biologo evoluzionista R. Dale Guthrie ha condotto uno studio simile su alcune impronte di mano del Paleolitico. Il suo lavoro, basato principalmente sulle differenze nella larghezza del palmo e del pollice, ha scoperto che la maggior parte delle impronte appartenevano a degli adolescenti. Secondo Guthrie, professore emerito alla University of Alaska di Fairbanks, le grotte apparivano pericolose e poco interessanti agli occhi degli adulti. I giovani, più avventurosi, "disegnavano quello che gli passava per la testa e cioè: donne adulte e formose, e animali spaventosi”.

Altri ricercatori concordano invece con la tesi di Snow. “Penso che questa ricerca rappresenti una svolta”, ha dichiarato l'archeologo Dave Whitley di ASM Affiliaties, una società americana di consulenze archeologiche. “Per la prima volta qualcuno è riuscito a raccogliere un buon numero di prove”.

Whitley non è affatto daccordo con la tesi di Guthrie, secondo cui queste raffigurazioni fossero legate esclusivamente alla caccia. La sua opinione, infatti, è che gli artisti fossero sciamani che entravano in trance per connettersi con il mondo degli spiriti. “Entrando in una qualsiasi di queste grotte, si inizia a provare una sorta deprivazione sensoriale molto, molto rapidamente, in cinque dieci minuti”, ha detto Whitley. “Questo può indurre in uno stato alterato di coscienza”. Il nuovo studio, tuttavia, non esclude la teoria degli sciamani, ha aggiunto Whitley, perché in alcune società di cacciatori-raccoglitori spesso gli sciamani sono donne o addirittura transessuali.

Questa nuova ricerca lascia aperte molte altre domande: perché i primi artisti erano donne? Realizzavano solo queste impronte o anche altre raffigurazioni? Questo tipo di analisi può essere applicata anche nel caso di artisti neandertaliani?

La domanda che Snow riceve più spesso, però, è perché questi antichi artisti, chiunque essi fossero, lasciavano queste impronte.

“Non ne ho idea, ma è probabile che chi le faceva, pensasse: ‘Ecco, questo è mio, l’ho fatto io’”.

Were the First Artists Mostly Women?

Virginia Hughes, National Geographic October 8 2013

Three-quarters of handprints in ancient cave art were left by women, study finds.

Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma.

Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female.

"There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time," said Snow, whose research was supported by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. "People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."

Archaeologists have found hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls across the world. Because many of these early paintings also showcase game animals—bison, reindeer, horses, woolly mammoths—many researchers have proposed that they were made by male hunters, perhaps to chronicle their kills or as some kind of "hunting magic" to improve success of an upcoming hunt. The new study suggests otherwise.

"In most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are," Snow said. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around."

Experts expressed a wide range of opinions about how to interpret Snow's new data, attesting to the many mysteries still surrounding this early art.

"Hand stencils are a truly ironic category of cave art because they appear to be such a clear and obvious connection between us and the people of the Paleolithic," said archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England. "We think we understand them, yet the more you dig into them you realize how superficial our understanding is."

Sex Differences

Snow's study began more than a decade ago when he came across the work of John Manning, a British biologist who had found that men and women differ in the relative lengths of their fingers: Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men's ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers.

A comparison of hand stencils

One day after reading about Manning's studies, Snow pulled a 40-year-old book about cave paintings off his bookshelf. The inside front cover of the book showed 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," Snow recalled.

Hand stencils and handprints have been found in caves in Argentina, Africa, Borneo, and Australia. But the most famous examples are from the 12,000- to 40,000-year-old cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. (See "Pictures: Hand Stencils Through Time.")

For the new study, out this week in the journal American Antiquity, Snow examined hundreds of stencils in European caves, but most were too faint or smudged to use in the analysis. The study includes measurements from 32 stencils, including 16 from the cave of El Castillo in Spain, 6 from the caves of Gargas in France, and 5 from Pech Merle.

Snow ran the numbers through an algorithm that he had created based on a reference set of hands from people of European descent who lived near his university. Using several measurements—such as the length of the fingers, the length of the hand, the ratio of ring to index finger, and the ratio of index finger to little finger—the algorithm could predict whether a given handprint was male or female. Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn't especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow's modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy.

Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.

"They fall at the extreme ends, and even beyond the extreme ends," Snow said. "Twenty thousand years ago, men were men and women were women."

Woman, Boy, Shaman?

Snow's analysis determined that 24 of the 32 hands—75 percent—were female. Some experts are skeptical. Several years ago, evolutionary biologist R. Dale Guthrie performed a similar analysis of Paleolithic handprints. His work—based mostly on differences in the width of the palm and the thumb—found that the vast majority of handprints came from adolescent boys.

For adults, caves would have been dangerous and uninteresting, but young boys would have explored them for adventure, said Guthrie, an emeritus professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "They drew what was on their mind, which is mainly two things: naked women and large, frightening mammals."

Other researchers are more convinced by the new data.

"I think the article is a landmark contribution," said archaeologist Dave Whitley of ASM Affiliates, an archaeological consulting firm in Tehachapi, California. Despite these handprints being discussed for half a decade, "this is the first time anyone's synthesized a good body of evidence."

Whitley rejects Guthrie's idea that this art was made for purely practical reasons related to hunting. His view is that most of the art was made by shamans who went into trances to try to connect with the spirit world. "If you go into one of these caves alone, you start to suffer from sensory deprivation very, very quickly, in 5 to 10 minutes," Whitley said. "It can spin you into an altered state of consciousness."

The new study doesn't discount the shaman theory, Whitley added, because in some hunter-gatherer societies shamans are female or even transgendered.

The new work raises many more questions than it answers. Why would women be the primary artists? Were they creating only the handprints, or the rest of the art as well? Would the hand analysis hold up if the artists weren't human, but Neanderthal?

The question Snow gets most often, though, is why these ancient artists, whoever they were, left handprints at all.

"I have no idea, but a pretty good hypothesis is that this is somebody saying, 'This is mine, I did this,'" he said.

Dean R. Snow

Professor of Archaeological Anthropology

Dean Snow is a North American archaeologist who grew up on the southern Minnesota prairie and received his BA degree at the University of Minnesota in 1962. He gained field experience in the Midwest and Alaska there at at his graduate university, the University of Oregon. He earned a PhD there in 1964. His doctoral dissertation was based on research carried out in highland Mexico.

Snow began his research and teaching career at the University of Maine, and established the first university-based archaeological research program in that state. He moved to the University at Albany in 1969 and remained there for 26 years. The U. S. Bicentennial celebrations drew him into historical archaeology, which involved innovative and revealing excavations on the key 1777 battleground site at Saratoga, New York. In 1982 he undertook a large multi-year project on Iroquois archaeology in New York’s Mohawk Valley, which led to new understandings of American Indian paleodemography, particularly the size of the aboriginal populations in 1492 and the ways in which epidemics later reduced them. This in turn led to multidisciplinary study of human migrations through archaeology and related disciplines. Snow served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Albany three times and was an associate dean for one term. In 1995 he moved to The Pennsylvania State University and served has Head of the Department of Anthropology there from then until 2005. More recently Snow has developed techniques for distinguishing male from female handprints at rock art sites found around the world. Development of the techniques has focused on examples in the Upper Paleolithic caves of France and Spain, but this research is also being taken up by others in North America and elsewhere. Dean Snow won election to the presidency of the Society for American Archaeology and served 2007-2009. Working with PSU colleagues in archaeology and information technology he is using his standing in the discipline to lead the development of new “cybertools” designed to make archaeological finds and publications more accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. His most recent book, Archaeology of Native North America, is the first truly continental synthesis of North American archaeology in forty years.