Link to Nat Geo
 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html 
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 Love it. If both this and the other story are true, it would mean the women 
doing the cave paintings were likely priestesses and/or shamans. The mental 
image--both visually and in terms of the type of energy involved--is so 
different from the one I've had up to now that it gives me chills up my spine. 
And it must say some important things about the nature of the society outside 
the caves as well.
 

 I'll never look at cave paintings the same way again.
 

 Do you have a link to the Nat Geo story about the acoustics in the caves? Or 
was what you quoted all there was to it?
 

 Seraphita wrote:
 
 Interesting - you learn something new every day but the mystery deepens.  
 

 National Geographic had this intriguing story:
 

 Prehistoric peoples chose places of natural resonant sound to draw their famed 
cave sketches, according to new analyses of paleolithic caves in France. In at 
least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match 
locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and 
musical instruments. "In the cave of Niaux in Ariège, most of the remarkable 
paintings are situated in the resonant Salon Noir, which sounds like a 
Romanesque chapel," said Iegor Reznikoff, an acoustics expert at the University 
of Paris who conducted the research. The sites would therefore have served as 
places of natural power, supporting the theory that decorated caves were 
backdrops for religious and magical rituals.

 

---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote:

 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.
 

 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.”
 

 
http://museumofclassicalantiquities.tumblr.com/post/63652239781/archaeology-were-the-first-artists-mostly
 
http://museumofclassicalantiquities.tumblr.com/post/63652239781/archaeology-were-the-first-artists-mostly


 




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