Some time ago I came across an article about ancient hand stencils. The big deal was that archaeologists in Spain had realized that the hand stencils were around 60,000 years old – so too old to belong to homo sapiens. (So our Neanderthal cousins were artists before us.)
To me, though, what was more interesting was the question I asked myself: Why had they painted their hands on the wall in the first place? The article I read seemed to suggest that the hand stencils were just basically art. But leaving the permanent mark of your own hand on a wall seems different to me. Painting a herd of bison, for example, is depicting something you saw. Painting people hunting the bison is perhaps showing something you lived. But painting your hand? That’s a prehistoric signature. It’s you.
So, being in the bathroom as I was (where I get most of my trivia), I began to Google these hand stencils, wanting to know more about them. Right away, I realized they did not happen just in Spain. Archaeologists have come across similar markings in caves in Argentina, France and even Borneo, Indonesia. And these are just the ones we know about. It can’t be a coincidence: it is the same social phenomenon that repeated across different continents.
What’s more, if you zoom out, you see that often these hand prints occurred alongside scenes of animals and such. Perhaps the hands were those of the authors of those works? Or maybe they were put there by people who wanted to show their solidarity around what was being illustrated.
It all made me think (as one does in the bathroom), that maybe the underlying compulsion these early people felt is not unlike what we feel today when we want to leave our own mark on our world.
In the end, is that not what scholars often want to do? Researchers write up their studies to publish in journals because they feel they have ideas worth sharing. Or they present their findings at conferences because they believe their insights are worth listening to. And they do not write/speak to random people. (Well, not usually.) They are addressing their “peeps,” the ones in their community of practice whose validation matters most to them.
That’s maybe – maybe – what was driving the owners of those hands all those thousands of years ago: they wanted to leave their mark, wanted to show their membership to a community.
At the Center for Faculty Excellence, we are people that have had the opportunity to engage with scholars and scholarship from all over the world. And what we see is that those basic ideas that seemed to exist even before there were writing systems persist to today when people need to write/speak in academic contexts. To leave their mark on this world.
