A Cross-cultural Perspective on Upper Palaeolithic Hand Images with Missing Phalanges

Hand images with missing phalanges occur at a number of Upper Palaeolithic rock art sites in Europe. It has been argued that they represent hand signals or a counting system, but there are reasons to believe they were actually produced by hands from which finger segments had been removed. Here, we report a cross-cultural study designed to shed light on this phenomenon. Our review of the ethnographic literature identified 121 societies from...