A stencil of a hand with missing numbers, in the Cosquerque cave, Marseille, France
Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
The depths of Gargas Cave in the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France have puzzled all visitors who have made the journey into its dark inner chambers. In prehistoric paintings and horse sculptures, bison and mammoths are hundreds of stencils made tens of thousands of years ago by people spitting red and black paint onto outstretched hands. Such motifs can be found in ancient sites around the world, from Australia to the Americas, Indonesia to Europe. For years, archaeologists have wondered its meaning. However, Garga’s is particularly mysterious, with about half of his hand appearing to be injured.
Aritz Irurtzun of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bayonne, France, said: So-called severed hands can be seen at many other prehistoric rock art sites, but Gargas Cave is the most prominent example of this phenomenon.
It has been suggested that these lost fingers were the result of accidents, frostbite, or ritual amputation. That’s it. Irurtzun and Ricardo Etxepare, also from CNRS, found a way to test this idea. What they found convinced them that the Gargas hand stencils reflected Stone Age sign language. Gargas’ stencil could even represent the oldest…
