CHILDREN OF PREHISTORY
Stone Age kids left their marks on cave art and stone tools
BY BRUCE BOWER
Walk about 300 meters into Rouffignac Cave
in southern France, turn left into a dark
chamber, raise a lantern, and gaze up at a
prehistoric marvel. A welter of undulating,
curving, crisscrossing lines blankets the ceil-
ing in abstract abandon. Single, double, and triple sets
of lines zigzag and run together in swirls. In other parts
of the cave, similarly configured lines appear beside,
inside, underneath, and on top of drawings of now-
extinct mammoths. Archaeologists refer to such marks
as finger flutings, the lines
that human fingers leave
when drawn over a soft
surface. In Rouffignac
Cave, finger flutings cut
through pliable red clay
to expose hard white
limestone underneath.
Lascaux Cave and Spain’s Altamira Cave. However, less attention
has focused on numerous instances of finger fluting, pigment-stained handprints and hand outlines, and crude drawings of animals and people, all of which may have had youthful originators.
“Kids undoubtedly had access to the deep painted caves [dur-ing the Stone Age], and they participated in some of the activities
there,” says Jean Clottes, a French archaeologist and the current
president of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations. “That’s a hard fact.”
Moreover, archaeologists suspect that many of the relics found
at prehistoric stone-tool sites around the world are the largely
unexamined handiwork of children and teenagers who were taking early cracks at learning to chisel rock.
“I suspect that children’s products dominate stone-tool remains
at some of those sites,” remarks
archaeologist John J. Shea of
Stony Brook (N. Y.) University.
Soon after the discovery of
Rouffignac’s finger flutings
about 50 years ago, researchers
started speculating about the
mysterious marks. One influential account referred to the
decorated ceiling as the “
Serpents’ Dome.” Others interpreted the finger flutings as
depictions of mythical creatures
or streams of water, symbols
from initiation rites into manhood, or shamans’ ritual signs.
New evidence, gathered by
Kevin Sharpe of the University
of Oxford in England and Leslie Van Gelder of Walden University in Minneapolis, challenges those assertions. They argue that
2-to-5-year-old kids generated the bulk of Rouffignac’s ancient
ceiling designs. Teenagers or adults must have hoisted children
so that the youngsters could reach the ceiling and run their fingers across its soft-clay coat.
Sharpe and Van Gelder’s study joins a growing number of efforts
aimed at illuminating the activities of Stone Age children.
Researchers who conduct such studies regard much, but certainly
not all, of prehistoric cave art as the product of playful youngsters
and graffiti-minded teenagers.
Stone Age adults undoubtedly drew the famous portrayals of
bison, mammoths, and other creatures at sites such as France’s
CAVE TOTS Sharpe and Van
Gelder have long speculated
that prehistoric kids created
many of the patterned lines that
adorn caves such as Rouffignac.
Their suspicion was kindled in
1986, when Australian archaeologist Robert G. Bednarik
published the first of several
papers contending that the
walls and ceilings of caves in
western Europe and southern
Australia contained numerous
examples of child-produced
grooves as well as some made
by adults. He coined the term
finger fluting for this practice.
Bednarik, who heads the
Australian Rock Art Research
Association in Caulfield South,
noted that, because of the spacing and width of the marks, a
large proportion of the grooves must have been the work of small
fingers. “Approximately half the markings were clearly made by children, even infants,” he says.
To date, Bednarik has investigated finger fluting in about 70
Australian and European caves. Analyses of wall and ceiling sediment in a portion of these caves indicate that the line designs originated at least 13,000 years ago, and in some cases 30,000 years
or more ago.
At Rouffignac, Sharpe and Van Gelder took Bednarik’s ideas an
empirical step further. First, the researchers asked children and
adults to run the fingers of one hand across soft clay. The scientists then measured the width of the impressions of each individual’s central three fingers. Participants included 124 pupils and 11
VAN GELDER
LINE DESIGNS — Prehistoric people used their fingers to create
patterns on the ceiling of a chamber in France's Rouffignac Cave. A
child made the three-fingered, horizontal units near the center of the
image, a new study suggests.
