What would it take for you to chop off the tip of your finger? Looking into the missing fingertips exhibited in hundreds of prehistoric handprints along the walls of Western European cave sites, archaeologists from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia purport that the absent phalanges were more likely to have been cut off during religious or social rituals rather than lost to disease or injury.
Professor Mark Collard and PhD candidate Brea McCauley of SFU’s Department of Archaeology have considered over 200 hand images with one or more missing fingertips from caves in France and Italy attributed to the Gravettian people — an Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer population that lived on the European landmass. While certain hypotheses regarded the presentation of shortened fingers as evidence of sign language or the result of frostbite, Collard and McCauley have argued since 2018 that the lost phalanges were intentional body modifications by cross-referencing examples present in other cultures.
Looking into existing research of 10 documented motivations for finger amputation from a over 100 cultures across all continents, Collard and McCauley concluded that the presentation of shortened fingers in Gravettian hand images was most likely evidence of a religious sacrificial ritual to elicit help from a higher power, or a social survival ritual that strengthened bonds and loyalty within the group and fostered hostility toward outsiders.
In response to criticisms of their 2018 conclusion, particularly the “catastrophic” impact of amputations to the middle and ring fingers during the late Ice Age versus that of the little finger which is most commonly cut across cultures, the SFU researchers conducted further research to back their claim and presented additional evidence this year at a European Society for the Study of Human Evolution meeting. Noting that the hand images with shortened fingers range from stenciled negatives to actual pigmented handprints and investigating additional cultural examples of finger truncation, Collard and McCauley underscored that ritually or socially motivated amputation should still be considered.
Collard pointed to contemporary finger shortening practices as well, especially highlighting the living women of the Dani population in Western New Guinea and Western Papua, Indonesia, who undergo ritual phalange removal in displays of grief and respect for family members who have died. Members of the Yakuza (Japanese organized crime syndicates) are also known for yubitsume, the amputation of the little finger as a display of atonement or as a punishment.
“This form of self-mutilation has been practiced by groups from all inhabited continents,” said Collard told the Guardian. “More to the point, it is still carried out today, as we can see in the behavior of people like the Dani.”
0 Commentaires