First Cave Artists May Have Been Mostly Women, New Study Suggests

First Cave Artists May Have Been Mostly Women, New Study Suggests: You go, girls. New research suggests that many of the first artistic masters were women, not men.

For years, researchers have assumed that ancient cave paintings created tens of thousands of years ago were made by men. This belief persisted because so much cave art is related to hunting, the domain of the prehistoric male. However, an American archaeological anthropologist now believes the measurements of ancient cave handprints suggest that the majority of those artists were women.

Dean Snow, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Penn State University, has spent a decade gathering data on cave paintings ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 years old, reports National Geographic. Snow's research culminated in a paper recently published in the journal American Antiquity. His report concludes three-quarters of the cave handprints included in the paper were left by females.