Hand stencils
Someone places a hand on a wall and blows pigment around it, leaving the most direct trace we have.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Red disks and hand stencils at El Castillo in Spain have been dated by uranium-series to at least 40,800 years ago, among the oldest cave art in Europe. Hand stencils recur independently across the world — Spain, Sulawesi, Argentina, Australia — over tens of thousands of years. Many are small enough to be children's. Of everything in the Palaeolithic record it is the most immediate: a person marking that they were present, in the shape of their own hand.