❝ Did most Stone Age people have all their fingers? According to the paintings they left behind, many of them did not. Plenty of cave paintings depict hands with missing fingers, and a trio of researchers believes they know why: those people had their fingers deliberately amputated. Right now it’s still a guess, but the researchers believe future evidence will help illuminate a strange and fascinating practice from our distant ancestors.
❝ …Starting around 50,000 years ago—a period that scientists refer to as the “Upper Paleolithic”—they started leaving behind all kinds of art and artifacts for modern scientists to discover.
Among those artifacts are cave paintings, where they recorded details of their lives for posterity. While the most well-known paintings feature pictures of bison or scenes of hunting, by far the most common artworks are simple hand paintings or tracings. Stone Age people left imprints of their hands on cave walls all over the world, and for some reason, a lot of those imprints are missing fingers.
RTFA for logical theorizing, assumptions based on existing knowledge and data. Parallels in not-so-modern religious codes are inevitable.