Wadi Sura II pictographs, Egypt.
Tiny handprints circled. Photo
www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk,
public domain.
In
the past, I have posted columns on human handprints in rock art, and columns
about animal tracks in rock art, but this is my first time reporting on little
animal hand prints in rock art.
An interesting
October, 2016, report by Laura Geggel for Live Science described an important
rock art found at a site in western Egypt. Discovered in the Egyptian portion
of the Libyan Desert in 2002, the cave is named Wadi Sura II, and is located
about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from Wadi Sura I, The Cave of the Swimmers,
discovered in 1933.
Wadi Sura II pictographs, Egypt.
Photo www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk,
public domain.
Among the
imagery in Wadi Sura II can be found a large number of hand prints, many of
them surprisingly small. "The roughly 8,000-year-old 'hands'
painted on a rock wall in the Sahara Desert aren't human at all, as researchers
originally thought, but are actually stencils of the 'hands' or forefeet of the
desert monitor lizard, a new study finds.
These tiny lizard hands are
intermingled with paintings of human adult hands, which ancient rock artists
stenciled around using red, yellow, orange and brown pigments, the researchers
said." (Geggel)
Dr.
Emmanuelle Honore, a research fellow of the McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom,
determined to attempt to find out what the little hand prints meant. "Honore was stunned the first time
she walked into Wadi Sura II in 2006. 'I immediately saw those tiny hands among
the [nearly] thousands of paintings,' she said. In earlier studies researchers
hypothesized that the large and small hands were stenciled around adult and
baby hands. Yet, shortly after looking at the 13 'baby' hand drawings, Honore
concluded that they weren't human.
For one thing, they were
too small to belong to a human infant, she said. Moreover, the digits were
pointy and 'very long and thin' Honore said. In contrast babies have fingers
that are roughly the same length as their palms." (Geggel)
Tiny hand print - center.
Wadi Sura II pictograph, Egypt.
Photo www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk,
public domain.
Honore's
research began with careful measurements of human hand prints, including the
hands of a number of normal and premature babies. "Honore and her colleagues also measured 11 of the tiny hands at
the Wadi Sura II site. (The other two were incomplete and difficult to measure,
she said.) In addition, they measured 30 of the large hands at Wadi Sura II and
30 hands from living adults, and found that they matched well, she said.
But several parameters
indicated that the tiny hands were not human. Though the stenciled fingers were
long, overall the hands were small - just 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) from the
base of the palm to the end of the middle finger. That's much smaller than a
human baby hand, which measures and average of 2.4 inches (6.2 cm.) long, she
said." (Geggel)
This
meant that the adult human hand prints were overlaid with unidentified small
hand prints. "At first, Honore thought the tiny hands belonged to a small
monkey. But none of the thousands of monkey hand pictures she researched looked
like those o the wall at Wadi Sura II. Then, when she was doing research at a
crocodile farm in Zambia, she realized that the prints belonged to a reptile.
The front feet of the
desert monitor lizard (Varanus) had the closest match to the paintings, she
found. A baby crocodile (Crocodylus) was another possibility. However,
crocodiles likely didn't live in the desert at that time, so a person would
have needed to transport one over from the Nile or another watery region,
Honore said." (Geggel)
"Other prehistoric
cultures used animals as stencils for their rock art. For example, the
Aboriginal people used emu foot stencils in the Carnarvon Gorge and Tent
Shelter in Australia, and choike/nandu (birds in the genus Rhea) stencils are
in the rock art at La Cueva de las Manos in Argentina." Honore is now working on a
study to try to figure out some possible reasons for the monitor lizard hand
prints.(Geggel)
For this
full article see Laura Geggel referenced below. She also reported that the
findings were published in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of Archaelogical
Science: Reports.
NOTE: The
images illustrating this article were obtained from the internet as the result
of a search for Wadi Sura II public
domain. If any of these images were, in fact, not public domain I apologize
for their use.
REFERENCE:
Geggel, Laura,
2016
Nonhuman Hands Found in Prehistoric Rock Art, October, 2016, LiveScience, http://www.livescience.com/53944-prehistoric-rock-art-nonhuman-hands.html
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