Profiled hands in Palaeolithic art: the first universally recognized symbol of the human form

Abstract

Drawing on both anthropology and philosophy, this paper argues that the profiled form of the human hand is a universally recognizable image; one whose significance transcends temporally and geographically defined cultural divisions, and represents the earliest known artistic symbol of the human form. The unique co-occurrence of five properties in the image of the human hand and the way it is recognized support this argument, including that it is: (1) unmistakably a hand, (2) unmistakably human, (3) a universal point of interface, (4) a universal referent of scale, and (5) an easy way of making a complex shape. This underappreciated aspect of hand art makes these images among the most important forms of early artistic expression encountered in the prehistoric record.

Keywords:

• Palaeolithic
• rock art
• universality
• hands
• symbolism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Robert Layton for his thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and Takashi Sakamoto for providing the image for Figure 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr James Walker is an affiliate researcher with the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. His research is focussed on hunting technology, hunter-gatherer subsistence, and complex social behaviours in prehistory.

Dr David Clinnick is a researcher in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. His research is focussed on hunter-gatherer demography and fission-fusion behaviour during the Palaeolithic.

Dr Jan Pedersen is a researcher at the Centre for Medical Humanities in the School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health at Durham University. His research is focussed on the phenomenon of wonder in relation to human flourishing.

Notes

1 Records of non-Western communities that practised hand stencilling and hand printing as a parietal art form within recent history.

2 A period between c.45 to 12 kya, in which modern humans are largely assumed to have colonized Europe to the exclusion of other hominin species (i.e. Neanderthals).

3 Synecdoche in its original sense means an act of speech in which a part or component of a subject is used as a reference for the entire subject itself. For example, the phrase ‘boots on the ground’ can be used to refer to the number of active soldiers in a military conflict.

4 Emic suggests an internal meaning or discourse that is explicit within a particular cultural context.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible thanks to PhD funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Durham Doctoral Scholarship scheme (DDS), and the Wellcome Trust.