Cave paintings of mutilated hands could be a Stone Age sign language

DEEP inside Gargas cave in the Pyrenees mountains of southern France is something that has puzzled every visitor who has made the journey into its dark inner chambers. Among prehistoric paintings and engravings of horses, bison and mammoths are hundreds of stencils made tens of thousands of years ago by people spitting red and black paint over their outstretched hands. Such motifs are found at ancient sites around the world, from Australia to the Americas and from Indonesia to Europe. For years, archaeologists have wondered at their meaning. But those in Gargas are especially mysterious because around half of the hands appear to be injured.

“It’s very obvious that some of the fingers are missing,” says Aritz Irurtzun at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bayonne, France. So-called mutilated hands can be seen at many other prehistoric rock art sites, but Gargas cave is the most striking example of this phenomenon.

It has been suggested that these missing fingers are the result of accidents, frostbite or ritual mutilation. Another possibility is that their creators deliberately folded away their fingers to produce specific patterns. Irurtzun and Ricardo Etxepare, also at CNRS, have now found a way to test this idea. What they have discovered convinces them that Gargas’s hand stencils reflect a Stone Age sign language. If so, these patterns add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Palaeolithic cave paintings may contain a variety of hidden codes. The Gargas stencils could even represent the oldest writing system we know of – by a very long way.

Prehistoric hand stencils have puzzled researchers for more than a century. Only a few – from Europe and Indonesia – have been reliably dated, and they turn out to be among the earliest known artistic motifs. Most are around 40,000 years old. One, found in Spain, is more than 66,000 years old, leading researchers to conclude a Neanderthal made it (see “Whose hands?”). “We know that hand stencils were some of the first markings of a visual culture to appear. They go back a lot longer than figurative art,” says Paul Pettitt at Durham University, UK. “Conceptually, they’re fascinating. It’s an odd thing to do, to create not a positive print, but a negative impression of it.” In his view, they were the inspiration for figurative art, as humans started recognising their ability to create lifelike forms in paint.

While these stencils might look like mere doodles to the untrained eye, they are often found deep in caves in hard-to-reach places, suggesting that they had some special significance. “They’re not just someone accidentally slapping their hand on a wall,” says Pettitt. Irurtzun shares this view. “Going deep into the cave, with the painting material and carrying a torch or lamp… it has to be something really profound for them. The question is, what type of meaning did they have?” he says. HipÓlito Collado Giraldo at the University of Coimbra in Portugal suggests that, among other things, they could be indicators of danger, orientation signs, group identity symbols or markers of hidden goods in the cave. “It is the big question everyone would like to answer,” he says.

Missing digits

Hand stencils with missing fingers are even more intriguing. They are most common in Gargas cave, where 114 of the 231 hand images are missing at least one finger segment. They also feature prominently in another French cave, Cosquer in Marseille, where 28 of the 49 hand stencils are missing digits.

One idea is that Stone Age people deliberately removed their digits. That might sound brutal, but ritual finger amputation is actually a relatively common practice. A 2018 study found it occurring in 121 recent societies – although it is generally limited to the pinkie finger. Amputation might explain some Stone Age hand stencils. “In Palaeolithic rock art, the most common hidden finger is only the pinkie,” says Collado Giraldo. But the stencils at Gargas and Cosquer exhibit a variety of missing digits. Moreover, the most common pattern observed in Gargas is an extended thumb with all the other digits displayed as stumps – an extreme mutilation that would have been catastrophic for the recipient. Besides, there are no missing fingers on any of the positive handprints in prehistoric European cave art – made by daubing the hand with paint and pressing it against a cave wall. These observations seem to rule out the mutilation idea and also the possibilities that fingers were lost to frostbite and accidents – at least at Gargas and Cosquer.

Instead, many researchers think that prehistoric artists deliberately created these patterns. “The missing fingers are only hidden fingers under the palm of the hand,” says Collado Giraldo. If so, this has intriguing implications. “It’s almost certainly some kind of communication system,” says Pettitt.

Taking this idea a step further, Irurtzun and Etxepare, who are both linguists, wondered whether Stone Age hand stencils might represent a prehistoric sign language. After all, various lines of research suggest that language originated with hand signs as well as vocalisations. Indeed, many societies continue to use a wide range of symbolic hand gestures during hunting, storytelling and rituals alongside – and sometimes in place of – their spoken language. These “alternate” sign languages can function as a lingua franca between groups that don’t share the same spoken language.

There is even evidence of people representing their sign language in cave symbols. More than a century ago, anthropologist Walter Roth documented an alternate sign language made by Queensland First Nations communities in Australia, which has parallels with depictions of hands in the rock art of the region. For example, a fist with just the little finger outstretched was the sign for a small caterpillar or grub.

To test whether the motifs in Gargas cave might represent a sign language, Irurtzun and Etxepare turned to a system used to analyse the ease with which the gestures employed in alternate sign languages can be made. By considering the physiology of the hand and forearm, they rated each of the patterns of the hand stencils on the cave wall. If these were random, and made with the support of a surface, you would expect 32 different permutations. Instead, there are just 10, all of which can be made in the air, suggesting that they correspond to particular hand gestures. Moreover, shapes that can’t be made in the air but only against a surface, aren’t seen in Gargas – or anywhere else. “We don’t find evidence of hand stencils that would be impossible in sign language,” says Irurtzun.

This isn’t the first time researchers have suggested that Stone Age cave paintings might contain a hidden code. Among stunning depictions of mammoths and bison, there are many graphic marks, ranging from simple lines, dots and triangles to complex configurations, such as ladders and feather shapes called penniforms. Genevieve von Petzinger at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal, has made a comprehensive catalogue of these signs from caves in Europe and has found that the Stone Age people living there had a repertoire of 32 different ones. What’s more, some of these symbols are found in caves throughout the world. Certain signs, including disks and hand stencils, are often found close together, and such combinations are of great interest for understanding the origins of writing, says von Petzinger. After all, combinations of just 26 letters of the Latin alphabet encode the vast amount of information of the English language.

A study published earlier this year even claims to have decoded the meaning of some of these symbols. Ben Bacon, an independent researcher based in London, worked with Pettitt and others to analyse dots and “Y” shapes found close to depictions of animals and created between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. They discovered what looks like a sort of hunting calendar to record the behaviour of prey, with the number of marks seeming to record an animal’s mating season in months after the beginning of spring, and a Y denoting the month it gave birth.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Stone Age people were playing around with graphic symbols in surprisingly sophisticated ways. So the idea that hand stencils with missing digits might depict a Stone Age sign language doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Collado Giraldo thinks it is one of the more promising interpretations of their meaning – at least at Gargas and Cosquer. Von Petzinger is also open to the idea. “At a basic level, an outline of a hand is actually a sort of message, perhaps ‘I was here’. Could they have been sending more complex signals in certain times and certain places? I’d say it’s possible for sure,” she says.

But some experts, including Karenleigh Overmann at the University of Colorado, are more sceptical. She isn’t averse to Leroi-Gourhan’s suggestion that the mutilated hands could be a code to coordinate hunting. “But the idea that they encode more language-like messages – I find that a little hard to accept,” she says.

Origins of writing

The jury is still out. But if Etxepare and Irurtzun are correct, their research has an extraordinary implication: the Gargas stencils could be an early form of writing. “If writing is a graphic representation of language – of linguistic expression – and the hand stencils represent an alternate sign language, then yes, that will be a sort of writing,” says Irurtzun. If so, it could be the oldest example of proto-writing that we know of.

Exactly how old remains uncertain because establishing the age of prehistoric cave art is notoriously challenging. It had long been assumed that the Gargas stencils were made in the Gravettian period, between 33,000 and 21,000 years ago. This seems to be backed up by radiocarbon dating of a bone fragment from a crack in the cave wall, which was found to be around 27,000 years old.

In Cosquer cave, some hand stencils have been dated directly and they, too, came in at 27,000 years old – as did one in a cave in Indonesia, which is missing its fourth and fifth digits. It is possible that the Gargas hands are much older still, given that many stencils on European cave walls were made 40,000 years ago or more. But even the most conservative date makes them mind-bogglingly older than the first formal writing system. Known as cuneiform, it arose in Mesopotamia just 5500 years ago, although it is thought to have developed from proto-writing with its roots in clay counting tokens that first appeared around 10,000 years ago.

Of course, it will require more evidence to back up this extraordinary claim. Irurtzun is already working on that. Late last year, he joined a team of archaeologists who descended into the deep, dark chambers of Gargas and neighbouring caves with 3D-imaging cameras and special lighting to detect paint marks that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Their findings haven’t been published yet, but we should soon know more. If they find similar hand gestures throughout the region, that would indicate a more widespread communication system, bolstering the idea that writing has its origins in the Stone Age.