Tiny lizards maybe, say scientists.
By Sreekanth A Nair
Scientists says that some 8,000-year-old handprints discovered 14 years ago in an Egyptian cave are not made by human hands.
There are more than 5000 images carved into stones in a Saharan cave called ‘cave of beasts’ in Egypt. Tiny hand prints are seen across the caves. The study of 13 handprints has revealed that they were not made by a human hand.
Scientists are of the opinion that tiny lizards might have made the prints. The cave, situated near Egypt’s borders with Libya, is also known as Wadi Sura II. It is just six miles away from the famous Cave of the Swimmers.
Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research has been conducting studies on the cave for years.
The researchers have taken the measurement of the prints and compared it to the hands of newborn babies. But the measurements haven’t matched with even the hands of newborn babies that were 26 to 36 weeks old.
Thus, they arrived at the conclusion that those hand prints were made by lizards and not human beings.
“They were much smaller than human baby hands, and the fingers were too long,” Emmanuelle Honoré told National Geographic.
But she is not sure of the reason why those hand prints are there in the cave.
“It’s very challenging for us as researchers to interpret these paintings since we have a culture that’s totally different,” she added.
‘This raises new perspectives for understanding the rock art at Wadi Sūra, and the behavior and symbolic universe of the populations who made it,’ she wrote in her study, published in the journal Archaeological Science.
Being the largest desert in the world, the average annual rainfall in Sahara is less than 2 millimeters. But it is known that during 8500 BC, seasonal rainfall started in the area and it attracted hunt-gatherers leading to the development of small human settlements.
By 5300 BC rainfall had stopped and the human settlements disappeared subsequently.
The scientists believe that the hunt-gatherers would have used lizards to make the prints since many of them were found along with adult sized human hand prints.
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