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Subscribe to RSSCambridge University archaeologist Jessica Cooney discusses her study of prehistoric cave art.
Archaeologists say the shapes of finger marks suggest that children as young as 2 years old made drawings on the walls of a Paleolithic cave dwelling, with an occasional boost from the grown-ups.
The tale of the "prehistoric preschool" was laid out by Cambridge University archaeologist Jessica Cooney last weekend at a conference on the archaeology of childhood. Cooney has been studying hundreds of markings made on the walls of France's Rouffignac cave complex. Many of the markings are thought to date back 13,000 years, to a hunter-gatherer culture known as the Magdalenian. The same culture is thought to have created the better-known cave drawings at Lascaux.
Like Lascaux, the 5-mile (8-kilometer) Rouffignac cave network has plenty of drawings, depicting mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and even a cave bear. But Cooney focuses on a different kind of art: impressions left behind in clay or "moonmilk" — a soft, white, crystalline precipitate that forms inside limestone caves. The ancient artists created the impressions by pressing or dragging their fingers through the soft material on the cave walls. Those markings are what Cooney and her research colleague, Walden University's Leslie Van Gelder, used to estimate how old the artists were.
The analysis built upon years of research that Van Gelder conducted along with her late husband, archaeologist-theologian Kevin Sharpe. They measured the hands of thousands of modern-day people and came up with a correlation between the span of a person's three middle fingers and the person's age. For example, if the tips of the three fingers cover less than 1.3 inches (34 millimeters) in width, the fingers definitely belong to a child less than 7 years old, Cooney explained.
That modern-day analysis was then applied to the cave impressions, known as finger flutings.
"By 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder had developed a way of determining the age and gender of children’s hand impressions, through the flutings," Cooney explained in Cambridge's news release. "As a methodology, it’s amazingly accurate. By measuring the flutings at Rouffignac with callipers and matching them up against the modern data set, we can tell the age of the child who made them to up to 7 years old — and that is being conservative. Similarly, if we have a clear finger profile, the shape of the top edges of the fingers, we can tell to 80 percent accuracy whether the individual was female or male. This works with both children and adults. Using methodology we can also identify marks made by the same child."
Cooney and Van Gelder spent a week making detailed measurements in the Rouffignac caves.
The researchers suspect that eight to 10 people, including four kids aged 7 or younger, were behind the ancient finger flutings. Children left marks in every chamber. One of them was apparently just 2 or 3 years old and may have been helped by a grown-up. "The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around 5 — and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl," Cooney said.
Cooney said that child's markings appear on cave ceilings more than 6 feet (2 meters) high, which would suggest that she was held up or put on someone's shoulders to make the marks. One chamber was so marked up by children that it may have served as a "playpen of sorts," she said.
Finger flutings have been found not only in France and Spain, but in Australia and New Zealand as well. Were they mere doodles, or was there a deeper significance to the markings?
"We don’t know why people made them," Cooney said in the news release. "We can make guesses, like they were for initiation rituals, for training of some kind, or simply something to do on a rainy day. In addition to the simple meandering lines, there are flutings of animals and shapes that appear to be very crude outlines of faces, almost cartoonlike in appearance. There are also hutlike shapes called tectiforms, markings thought to have a symbolic meaning which are only found in a very specific area of France. When in 2006 Sharpe and Van Gelder showed that that some of the tectiforms were the work of children, it was the first known instance of prehistoric children engaging in symbolic figure-making."
Personally, I lean toward the idea that the markings were the Paleolithic equivalent of kindergarten fingerpainting, but what do you think? Feel free to speculate in the comment section below.
More about prehistoric cave art:
- Altamira cave art in peril again, scientists say
- 'Cave' documentary is awesome and immediate
- Fungus threatens famed Lascaux cave drawings
- Gallery: Ancient rock art from around the world
For a guided tour of the Rouffignac cave complex's kiddie art, check out Rossella Lorenzi's report for Discovery News.
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
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"The most prolific child artist was a 5 year old girl"? That would be Ayla, of course...:)
What a mammoth adventure.
Or, was it her daughter Jonayla?
We don't know enough about the culture to make an educated guess about the reason for the marks. If the cave was considered a holy place and visiting was restricted, the marks might be just playing with the "writing tools." More likely, visits were not restricted and since there are limited marks from each child, there was probably some ritual associated with it - perhaps associating the son or daughter of a chief or shaman with the god of the cave, etc. We know that 12,000 years later the Celts (Gauls) who lived in the same area obeyed Druid priests who held secret rituals in the woods that the Romans describe as so frightening even the wind was afraid to pass through the clearings in which they were held. Did their prehistoric ancestors have similarly awe-inspiring cave ceremonies to mark the passage of the stages of life?
Mick,
Which is it? Either we don't know enough to guess the reason for the markings or we do, as you proceed to do yourself. I think we can guess based on information in the article not on what is known or unknown about the Celts of 12K years later.
It says the cave was a dwelling... therefore it was not a restricted place. It says nothing about "writing tools" other than the children's hands. It says a certain gallery contains a large number of children's markings and one in particular decorates a ceiling too high for the child to have reached it without adult help.
That certainly paints a picture of children expressing their imaginations symbolically with the aid or at least in the presence of adults... probably care givers. All care givers are teachers to some extent, so to characterize that gallery as a kindergarten is not far fetched.
What the article does not say is with the caves at Lascaux which were also dwellings, only certain deep, very hard to reach sections were used by adults for some rituals associated with drawings of animals. But we are able to make an educated guess here too.
Comparisons to more recent and contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures give clues to the nature of the association between animal drawings and the real objects. They are fetishes... painted not to be worshipped, but to be revered for their contribution to the life of the tribe.
They are thought both to honor the spirits of the animals taken and preserve that connection for the future. They were probably also used in rituals honoring the prowess of the hunters and as teaching guides for young initiates into manhood.
The Celts of 12K years later were not the decendents of the Rouffignac cave dwellers. The Celts originated in the area of modern day Hallstatt, Austria and did not arrive in the area until around 500 BCE.
I think they were made by Hobbits not children.
This goes to prove that "Mr. Clean" in a sponge was not invented until much later in history.
I'm not surprised, kids are kids and the adults taught them whatever skills they had, whatever period they lived in. It continues.
They're probably close to the truth here, BUT - you have to assume these peoples' hands had the same correlation between finger size and age that our hands do. How can they know that they did? This sounds like one of those leaps of reasoning that I got docked for, doing proofs in math classes.
We have enough existing bones and skeletons from the "cro-magnon" people who painted in these caves to know that their physical structure was very similar to ours. This was only 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, after all. We're not talking about ramepithicus or australopithcines like "Lucy" and her kin from milions of years ago.
My "study finds"their were no such thing as prehistoric kids.
I think that people then and now were not all that different. lets see. What do you do when you are sitting around your cave all day with a 2 year old a 5 year old and a 7 year old. You find things to keep the kid occupied.
Drawing is a great activity to occupy the young. Mine still do it all the time, and I also join in on occasion.
Yeah. Cave painting back then might have been the equivalent of television today.
I'll believe it when they find "Susie is a boogerhead" on a cave wall!
I wonder if there was any sibling rivalry, or how much, when it was a struggle just to stay alive.
I agree, you have to keep the kids occupied and what better way than to have them scribble on the cave wall. As you said, people are not that different, only our technology has changed not our behavior.
Cro-Cripts and BC-Bloods if you ask me. /sarc/
looks like billy crystal may have been on to something...perhaps hieroglyphics really WERE an ancient cartoon strip called "sphynxie" ;) great article, makes perfect sense to this artist.
Three middle fingers? I have a middle finger for this conjecture.
”Finger flutings have been found not only in France and Spain, but in Australia and New Zealand as well. Were they mere doodles, or was there a deeper significance to the markings?”
I think the fact that these 'finger flutings' created by 'smaller' hands were found on 'multiple' continents tells us they are not just kids' random doodles!
Actually, I'd say that definitively tells us they are.
So you think they all thought it was a good idea to have their kids doodle on places they can't reach?
Who said anything about thinking anything was a good idea? What do you think they were? Tall, lightly-built aliens?
Haha - who knows! I'm just saying it seems hard to believe we would find such similar doodles on different continents. I would love to do a research on children's art today to see if we find any resemblance across continents of tribes who has no communication with each other.
I think it's just kids making marks in the stuff their rlders showed them. Pigment was too labor intensive to let the kids play with it but the moonmilk was fine. And it let the family play together.
There's some evidence in the south of France and Switzerland that the already extinct cave bear was worshiped.....I wonder if the fluting was to emulate the scratches in the walls that cave bears made?
How and why do kids draw in the dark? And if torches were used how do they keep from dying of smoke inhalation?
Finally, parents who let their kids draw on the walls.
"Oh great, now we'll never get our deposit back"!
Spirits, rituals , shamans , I will make something up to show everyone how smart I am. Maybe they were aliens working on technology that would later build the pyramids. Man. everybody just complicates things. Maybe , just maybe, the were just drawing in the mud. It can't be that simple, can it?
Might have been just getting boogers off their fingers. Some things never change. It's Art...It's snot...It's Art...It's snot...
The video shows a diagram of the cave system... it is enormous... 5 miles deep and multi-layered. Maybe some of the flutings are simple directional, territorial or utility markings... like street signs, addresses, apartment numbers, restrooms, aisle three, beadworks, spear points, lumber, tannery. One of the tectiforms shown looks like a directional arrow. No reason to assume the children's marking are anything but instructional or playful immitations of the adult markings.
I'm glad to see some things never change - like kids writing on the walls of their home. I wonder if they got in trouble for doing that back then, like kids still do today when the parents see their drawings!
Yep, had to be fingers. No other possible explanation. Perhaps there's a tie to global warming?