An international team of researchers describe ancient hand and footprints made deliberately which they argue represent art. \u00a9 Image credit: Artwork by Gabriel Ugeto, provided by author Matthew Bennett<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nArcheology usually deals with fragments from past cultures, such as pieces of pottery, building foundations, monuments and bones. It is up to the scientists to infer, to fill in the gaps and try to determine what the people were actually like. But handprints are the direct signature of a person.<\/p>\n
Tourists on Hollywood Boulevard squat down to place their hands in the prints of their favourite actors to get a sense of what it might be like to shake their hand, sort of a virtual handshake. Now imagine a handshake that reaches across millennia into an actual moment in time, to a couple of kids who were just messing in the mud.<\/p>\n","protected":false,"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"html"}]},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Archaeologists discovered 200,000-year-old hand and footprints on the Tibetan Plateau at an altitude of 4,269 meters above sea level, that could be the world\u2019s earliest cave art.<\/p>\n","protected":false,"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"html"}]},"author":1,"featured_media":33314,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[88,152,584,241],"blocksy_meta":[],"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"link","format":"url"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mru.ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}