Paleolithic kids’ finger painting in underground caves may have had a lofty purpose

14,000-year-old footprints of at least two children, together with an adolescent and two adults, were recently identified some 400 meters deep in the Basura Cave in northern Italy.

Elsewhere, at France’s Rouffignac Cave, evidence points to a child under the age of five drawing at least one line on a panel depicting a saiga antelope. Archaeologists found footprints of children — and even babies — in another French cave, Fontanet, where they estimated children entered areas with ceilings lower than 130 centimeters.

A team of Israeli scientists from Tel Aviv University, trying to unravel what the children were doing in these ancient underground grottoes, have come up with an unusual hypothesis: the kids were mini-priests or spiritual mediators.

According to this theory, children were considered “adept mediators between the world of the living and that of the spirits” that could be encountered in the caves, as Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Ella Assaf, Dr. Yafit Kedar, and Prof. Ran Barkai wrote in a paper published in the journal arts earlier this month.

There is some sense in the idea that children may have played a more prominent role in all facets of life than their modern counterparts. Modern scholars believe up to 40 percent of the general population of Upper Paleolithic humans were children or young adults. In some decorated caves, they determined that up to 9% of the documented visitors were infants, and up to 27% were children.

“To date, around 400 caves containing cave art have been discovered, mainly in France and Spain, with the artwork dated between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago,” Assaf said in a statement released by Tel Aviv University on Monday. “There is solid evidence of children’s participation in the artwork — handprints and finger paintings made by children aged two to 12. In addition, footprints and handprints of children have been found in some caves, alongside those of adults. This naturally raises the question: Why were the children there?”

Visiting caves often implied climbing or descending rugged terrain, walking in the darkness, and experiencing low oxygen levels due to torches or lamps.

Hallucinations and out-of-body experiences caused by hypoxia (low level of oxygen in body tissues) might have influenced the perception of cave painters, enhancing their connection with their spiritual world.

Cave artwork mainly depicts geometric patterns and animals — while images featuring plants or other natural phenomena are rare.

“Cave art created by early humans is a fascinating phenomenon that intrigues many researchers,” Assaf said. Her colleague Kedar added, “Despite extensive research on cave art, few studies have focused on the presence of children.”

Little hands and little feet

Most researchers identify whether a sign was made by a child or an adult based on the width of the finger flutings — or lines left by human fingers on cave surfaces, although the method is not accepted by all in the field.

“For example, the width of the impression made in clay by an individual’s three central fingers could serve as a criterion,” Assaf, Barkai, and Kedar wrote in the paper. “Impressions with a width of 30 mm or less are typically found in children under five, while impressions with a width of 33 mm or less are mainly seen in children aged seven or younger.”

Kedar said that most scientists believe that children’s evident participation in cave rituals “served an educational purpose — passing down knowledge, traditions, and customs to the next generation,” Kedar said.

“In our study, we argue that children’s involvement had an additional meaning: In fact, they played an important, unique role of their own — direct communication with entities residing in the depths of the earth and otherworldly realms,” she said. The current study builds on the team’s previous work, which “presented cave artworks as expressions of cosmological approaches, with emphasis on relationships between humans and various entities.”

Turning to today’s tribes to understand the past

Assaf, Barkai, and Kedar also based their hypothesis on documented practices among contemporary indigenous tribes, as well as populations whose traditions and rituals are well-documented in historical records.

“Among indigenous Australian societies, for example, children were actively involved in rituals and ceremonial cycles, in which communicating with other-than-human deities was part of the journey from childhood to adulthood,” they wrote in the paper.

Among others, the researchers considered the trance-healing dance of the San people, a hunter-gatherer tribe from the Kalahari desert in the southern part of the African continent. As documented by some anthropologists in past decades, boys and girls of all ages, babies included, regularly took part in the hours-long ritual.

The scholars also looked at the mystical role attributed to caves in many ancient cultures, including Maya, Inca and Native American ones.

“Many of these societies regarded caves as gateways to the underworld — where, through shamanic rituals, they could communicate with cosmic entities and inhabitants of the underworld, to resolve existential problems,” Barkai said in the statement.

“In this context, young children were perceived as liminal beings — belonging to both the realm they had left just recently (before birth) and the world they currently inhabit. Thus, small children were considered particularly suited to bridging the gap between the worlds and delivering messages to non-human entities.”

Paleolithic children, the scientists contend, were an essential part of the ceremonies that caves housed.

“We propose that children joined adults on journeys into the depths of caves and participated in painting and rituals as part of their role in the community — as ideal mediators with entities from the beyond,” Barkai said.