Giving Cave Painters a Hand

The long-held belief that Neanderthals and others were stupid brutes because they had not evolved intelligence yet has been fully overturned. They were fully human and intelligent, but Darwin's disciples do not want to admit that creationists were right all along, so they are called "archaic humans."

These folks had some interesting cave paintings, and those have even impressed modern artists because of the skill involved. One puzzler was painting involving hands. Some researchers think that they may have determined some of what was going on.

Handprint art in Gargas cave, WikiComm / José-Manuel Benito (Public Domain)

Why hands? Well, a hand is something convenient to portray, and they were done in many caves. One cave showed a difference: missing fingers. It is unlikely that the residents had numerous accidents with chainsaws, and these were tucked away in an area that may have been special. Perhaps they were used to send signals.

If you study on it, people use their hands for communication. Sign languages can spell out words one letter at a time. We have informal or impromptu hand signals by which we try to communicate over noise, when silence is imperative, with people of another language, and so on. It makes sense to consider that these intelligent descendants of Adam inserted messages. I wonder if they had stayed long enough, they would have "whited out" old messages to prepare for new ones.

Ancient cave paintings are found at sites from Australia to the Americas, Indonesia to Europe, and everywhere in between. Our claimed evolutionary ancestors clearly loved art, and their paintings have left us a fairly good picture of their world and culture. The paintings include those things that were important to them, such as other humans, horses, bison, woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, and boats.

. . .

Positive hand prints, as defined above, were made by covering the hand with paint, then pressing it against the cave wall, leaving a definite hand print, even including some finger-palm prints. This observation appears to rule out both the mutilation idea and the possibility that fingers were lost to frostbite or accidents. How old these prints are “remains uncertain because establishing the age of prehistoric cave art is notoriously challenging.”

To fully grasp this material, click on "Cave Paintings May Contain Codes." As expected, this video has ancient-Earth assumptions, but you can still see some cave art: