Men and women could have deliberately cut off their fingers during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of Paleolithic cave art.
In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain depicting silhouettes of hands. On over 200 of these prints, the hands are missing at least one digit. In some cases only a single upper segment is missing; in others several fingers are gone.
In the past, this absence of figures was attributed to artistic license by the creators of cave paintings or to ancient people’s actual medical problems, including frostbite.
But scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be much more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers deliberately amputated in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” Collard said.
Nor was the custom unique to one time or place, he added. “Many societies encourage finger amputation today and have done so throughout history.”
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Collard quoted the Dani people of the New Guinea Highlands. “Women there sometimes have one or more fingers cut off after the death of loved ones, including sons or daughters. We believe that Europeans did the same sort of thing in Paleolithic times, although the exact belief systems involved may have been different. It is a practice that was not necessarily routine, but which took place at various times throughout history, we believe.”
Collard and colleagues first published their finger amputation thesis a few years ago, but were criticized by other scientists, who argued that the amputation of fingers would have been catastrophic for the people involved. Men and women without fully functioning hands would not be able to cope with the harsh conditions that prevailed millennia ago.
Since then, Collard, along with PhD student Brea McCauley, has collected more data to support the amputation thesis. In a paper presented at the European Society conference, they said their latest research provides even more compelling evidence that the removal of numerals to appease gods explains the hand sculptures in caves in France and Spain.
These paintings fall into two types: prints and stencils. In the former, a person placed his or her hand in pigment and then pressed it against a wall, creating a handprint. Stencils were created by placing a hand on a wall and then painting pigment over it to create a silhouette. In both cases, hands with missing digits were found among the wall art at four main sites; Maltravieso and Fuente del Trucho caves in Spain, and Gargas and Cosquer caves in France. The Cosquer Caves, near Marseille, were the most recent caves discovered in 1985 by scuba diver Henri Cosquer.
The team looked elsewhere for evidence of finger amputation in other societies and found more than 100 cases where it was practiced. “This practice was clearly invented several times independently,” they say. “And it’s been involved by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it’s entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves were involved in the practice.”
Nor were the examples limited to Europe, they add. Four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in South Asia and one in Southeast Asia contain evidence of finger amputation. “This form of self-mutilation has been practiced by groups from all inhabited continents,” Collard said. “More to the point, it is still carried out today, as we can see in the behavior of people like the Dani.”
Collard pointed to rituals still performed in Mauritius and other places, such as fire walking, stabbing the face with spears and piercing the skin with hooks so that a person can pull heavy chains behind them. “People become more inclined to cooperate with other group members after going through such rituals. Amputating fingers may have simply been a more extreme version of this type of ritual.”
