Prehistoric Preschool? Paleolithic Kids Finger-Painted in Caves - featured October 10, 2011
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Among the Paleolithic artists who left behind paint-decorated caves were kids as young as 3, a new study finds.
In fact, finger-painting tots were quite prolific 13,000 years ago in the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths in France, according to Cambridge archaeologist Jess Cooney, who presented her findings last week at a conference on the archaeology of childhood at Cambridge University. The main art form was finger flutings, decorative lines made by people running their fingers along cave walls.
"So far, we haven't found anywhere that adults fluted without children," Cooney said in a statement. "Some of the children's flutings are high up on the walls and on the ceilings, so they must have been held up to make them or have been sitting on someone's shoulders." [Science as Art: A Gallery]
The most prolific child artist, Cooney said, was a girl of 5.
Early artists
The Cave of a Hundred Mammoths at Rouffignac is splashed with ancient paintings of mammoths, horses and rhinoceroses, along with the fluted lines. Archaeologists peg these paintings at 13,000 years old, at minimum. The creators were probably people of the Magdalenian culture, the same group that created the famous cave art at Lascaux, France.
Researchers have known since 2006 that some of the flutings in the cave were created by children. But Cooney and her colleagues measured finger widths from thousands of modern-day people, enabling them to identify precise ages for individuals under the age of 7 based on finger-traces alone. With clear impressions, researchers can also tell with up to 80 percent accuracy whether the child-artist was a boy or girl.
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