Gargas Cave: Hundreds of Hand Stencils in the Pyrenees

Gargas is a limestone cave at Aventignan in the Hautes-Pyrénées of south-west France, famous for more than 200 Ice Age hand stencils. Made around 27,000 years ago or earlier, during the Gravettian period, many of the hands appear to lack parts of one or more fingers. These “mutilated hands” have puzzled researchers for over a century and make Gargas one of the most discussed caves in prehistoric art.

The cave and its discovery

Gargas lies in the foothills of the Pyrenees, not far from the Roman and medieval town of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. The cave has two connected levels and was known and visited long before its art was recognised. Its deposits contain bones of cave bears and other Ice Age animals, as well as stone tools left by people.

The hand stencils were reported in 1906 by Félix Régnault, a prehistorian from the region who had worked in the cave. The leading experts of the day, Émile Cartailhac and the Abbé Henri Breuil, soon studied the cave and confirmed that the hands were prehistoric. Later researchers added detailed surveys of the paintings and engravings.

The hand stencils

The hands are negative stencils. A person pressed a hand against the wall and blew pigment around it, so that the outline of the hand remained in bare rock against a coloured background. Most are red, made with iron-rich ochre, or black, made with manganese or charcoal pigment.

The stencils cluster in several panels, including the so-called Sanctuary of the Hands and the Great Wall. Some belong to adults and some are small enough to be children’s hands. A few positive prints, made by pressing a painted hand on the rock, also exist, but negatives dominate.

The puzzle of the missing fingers

What makes Gargas special is that a large share of the hands appear to lack one or more finger segments. Often the thumb is complete while other fingers are shortened. Similar hands are known in a few other caves, including Cosquer near Marseille, but Gargas has by far the most.

Three main explanations have been proposed:

• Amputation: some early researchers thought the fingers had been deliberately cut off, perhaps in ritual or mourning.
• Disease or injury: others suggested frostbite, gangrene or circulatory diseases could have caused finger loss in a harsh Ice Age climate.
• Folded fingers: the prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan and others argued that the fingers were simply bent down, and that the different combinations formed signs, perhaps similar to the hand signals used by hunters.

Experiments show that folded fingers can produce stencils very like those at Gargas, and the regular, repeated patterns fit a system of signs better than random injuries. Many scholars therefore favour this idea, but it cannot be proven.

Who made the hands?

Measurements of the stencils suggest that the people who made them were of different ages and sizes, from small children to adults. In 2013 the American archaeologist Dean Snow compared the relative lengths of fingers in stencils from several French and Spanish caves, including Gargas, and argued that many of them were probably made by women. His method has been debated, but it challenged the old assumption that cave art was made mainly by adult men.

The presence of children’s hands alongside adults’ suggests that making stencils was not restricted to a few specialists. Visits to the cave may have been shared activities involving several members of a group, although the purpose of those visits is unknown.

Engravings and dating

Gargas also contains about 150 engraved figures, mainly of animals such as horses, bison, ibex and mammoths, along with lines and finger tracings in soft surfaces. The engravings are often fine and hard to see without careful lighting.

A small splinter of bone, deliberately pushed into a crack in the rock near the hand stencils, was radiocarbon dated in the early 1990s. Its result placed the hand stencils in the Gravettian period, roughly 27,000 years ago or somewhat earlier, making them older than the paintings at Lascaux. This places Gargas in the same broad period as the Pech Merle spotted horses, whose panel is also framed by hand stencils.

Timeline

• Middle and Upper Palaeolithic: Cave bears and people use the cave at different times.
• c. 27,000 years ago or earlier: Gravettian people make the hand stencils and engravings.
• 1906: Félix Régnault reports the hand stencils.
• 1910s: Émile Cartailhac and Henri Breuil study the cave’s art.
• 1960s: André Leroi-Gourhan argues that the “missing” fingers were folded.
• Early 1990s: Radiocarbon dating of a bone splinter supports a Gravettian age.

Hand stencils around the world

Hand stencils are among the most widespread forms of early art. They appear in Spain, at sites such as Cueva de El Castillo, in Sulawesi cave art in Indonesia, in Australia and in South America. Gargas stands out because of the number of its hands and the strange patterns of their fingers.

Why it matters

The Gargas hands are a direct trace of individual people, adults and children, who stood in the cave some 27,000 years ago. Whether their shortened fingers record injuries, rituals or a lost sign language, they show that Ice Age people used their own bodies to create meaning. The cave remains one of the most personal and mysterious sites of Palaeolithic art.