How do we know the gender distribution of cave art painters?

Question

I recently visited an exhibition about climate, nature and culture during the last glacial period.

One interactive exhibit about cave paintings sported a plaque saying:

"...Jetzt wissen wir, dass es genauso viele Künstlerinnen wie Künstler gab, wenn nicht sogar mehr."

My translation to English:

"...Now we know that there were as many female artists as male artists, if not more."

I have been asking myself, and now all of you:

How do we know that? What evidence has survived that can discriminate between the sexes of the painters?

Translated text:

Cave art

What is the meaning of the picture caves? Maybe some tell a creation story or other myths that we no longer know? Maybe the walls are contact zones to a world beyond? The picture caves enchant us with light and shadow, shapes and colors. For a long time it was thought that cave art was a male thing or served initiation rites for male youths. Now we know that there were as many female artists as male artists, if not more.

Answer 1

A significant portion of cave paintings are so called "hand stencils": People pressed one hand onto the wall and applied color around the hand.

Image: Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina / Wikipedia

So from these paintings, we can infer the shape of the artist's hand. It had been known for a long time that among the hand stencils there were bigger and smaller hands. One older interpretation was that the bigger hands belonged to older, experienced (male) hunters, and the smaller hands belonged to young (male) "novices", maybe as some kind of intiation ritual.

But about ten or twenty years ago, scientists started to look closer into the hand shapes, and found interesting results. The proportions of a male hand and a female hand tend to be different. For example, with males the ring finger is typically significantly longer than the index finger. With females it's the other way around, or both fingers are of about equal length.

One of the first scientists to look into this was Dean Snow, an anthropologist from Pennsylvania State University. According to an German article on wissenschaft.de, the homepage of the German science magazine "bild der wissenschaft", he leafed through a photo book with pictures of stone-age cave art. There, he ran across a hand stencil that clearly didn't originate from a man, but from a woman. In that book alone, out of the six stencils shown, four were from female hands.

Snow decided to look closer into this, visited several caves with stone age art in Europe and got high-res photos from other caves. Additionally, he took measurements from the hands of contemporary people from the respective regions. He found that only about 10% of the stone age hand stencils had originated from adult males, and 15% from juveniles. The vast majority of 75% of the stencils clearly had originated from adult females. According to Snow's measurements, the sexual dimorphism of the human hand was even more pronounced 30.000 years ago than it is today. He had feared that because of the significant overlap today, it might be hard to assign the sex of the stencils' creators. But the stone age hands all fell into the extreme areas of the modern statistical distribution.

Snow published his findings in a paper in the journal "Antiquity" in 2006. Since, other scientists also found that at least the hand stencils weren't as much of a "male domain" as had been assumed before, for example Paul Pettitt (Durham University) et al., also in "Antiquity".

Obviously, this method won't work for other cave paintings like depictions of animals.

Answer 2

The evidence for equal male/female participation seems to be 'hand stencils'.

I'm sure the conclusions that have been reached about the sex of each hand are correct. And yes, in a narrow sense, it makes each participant an 'artist'.

But only in a narrow sense. A male or female hand print 'signing' a hunting scene would be more persuasive (though it might only indicate 'I killed this beast'). A wall full of prints just records 'there were this many people'. It tells us nothing about who organised the project.

"Maybe the walls are contact zones to a world beyond?" I'm afraid the gender 'evidence' is just as fanciful, though attractive to today's thought.