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| A study of tiny hand imprints in a Saharan cave have revealed that they are not human. Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave in 2002, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan. In this image the 'baby' print is shown in the center of the larger adult hand [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
Anthropologist Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research said she was stunned when she saw the shape of the small prints.
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| The cave, which is also known as Wadi Sura II, includes 5,000 images that were painted or engraved into stone around 8,000 years earlier. Among the images are what was believed to be stencilled hands and feet of children – but new research now claims they may have been created by lizards [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
Honoré compared measurements taken from the hand outlines in the cave with those taken from the hands of newborn human infants of around 37 to 41 weeks old.
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| Scientists said there is an 'extremely low probability' that the hands in theCave of the Beasts were human [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
Honoré discovered that there is an 'extremely low probability' that the hands in the Cave of the Beasts were human. Instead, she believe they may have been created by the forelegs of desert monitor lizards or, possibly, the feet of young crocodiles.
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| The cave also included drawings of hunter gatherers and headless beasts. In total, around 5,000 drawings were found [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
'[This raises new perspectives for understanding the rock art at Wadi Sūra, and the behaviour and symbolic universe of the populations who made it,' she writes in her study, published in the journal Archaeological Science
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| Anthropologist Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research said she was stunned when she saw the shape of the unusually small prints [Credit: Serge Sibert/Cosmos] |
The Eastern Sahara, a region the size of Western Europe that extends from Egypt into Libya, Sudan and Chad, is the world's largest warm, dry desert. Rainfall in the desert's centre averages less than 2 millimetres a year, but the region was once much less arid.
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| Honoré is reluctant to speculate on why such a civilisation would imprint the legs of animals on their cave walls. 'It's very challenging for us as researchers to interpret these paintings since we have a culture that's totally different [from the one that created it],' she said [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
The mass exodus corresponds with the rise of sedentary life along the Nile that later blossomed into pharaonic civilisation that dominated the region for thousands of years. It is believed hunter gathers held up the creatures to make the prints, many of which were found alongside adult sized human hand stencils.
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| It is believed hunter gathers held up the creatures to make the prints, many of which were found alongside adult sized human hand stencils [Credit: Emmanuelle Honoré] |
'It's very challenging for us as researchers to interpret these paintings since we have a culture that's totally different [from the one that created it],' she said.
Author: Ellie Zolfagharifard | Source: Daily Mail [March 01, 2016]