Amputation?

January 6th, 2024| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Many prehistoric handprints apparently show a finger missing. Now Canadian scientists say evidence from cave art all over the world shows digits may have been ritually removed to appease deities or aid social cohesion.

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers Profs. Mark Collard, Brea McCauley, and David Maxwell of Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC) pointed to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone.

Well, all kinds of explanations sprouted: artistic license of cave-painters, medical issues with hands, including frostbite, etc. But in many different countries, separated in time and space? Was this a new form of art that had spread, or a new disease that had become an epidemic?

Collard and Co. confess that the truth may be far more gruesome.

There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities. Nor was the habit unique to one time or place: quite a few societies encourage fingers to be cut off today and have done so throughout history.”

The Dani people from the New Guinea Highlands, for example:

Women there sometimes have one or more fingers cut off following the death of loved ones, including sons or daughters. We believe that Europeans were doing the same sort of thing in paleolithic times, though the precise belief systems involved may have been different. This is a practice that was not necessarily routine but has occurred at various times through history, we believe.”

The scientists had first propounded their theories several years ago in “A Cross-cultural Perspective on Upper Palaeolithic Hand Images with Missing Phalanges,” published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. But that paper only won them criticism: the amputation of fingers would have been catastrophic for the people involved—men and women without fully functioning hands would be unable to cope with the harsh conditions that prevailed millennia ago.

But now, with more data available from their research, these scientists have produced even more convincing evidence. The team looked elsewhere for evidence of finger amputation in other societies and found more than hundred instances where it had been practiced.

The authors:

This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times. And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at various cave sites engaged in the practice. Nor were the examples confined to Europe: four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia and one in south-east Asia contain evidence of finger amputation.”

There is, of course, no evidence that deity or deities were appeased by—or even aware of—these amputations.

In the Bible it is God’s hand that is miraculous, trustworthy, and safe.

Arise, Yahweh; God, lift up Your hand;
do not forget the afflicted.
Why has the wicked reviled God?
He says to his heart, “You will not call to account.”
You have seen—trouble and provocation You Yourself behold.
He gives [himself] into Your hand;
upon You he abandons [himself]—the unfortunate one.
Psalms 10:12–14

The limb of the evildoer, on the other hand [pun intended!], is destroyed:

Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer;
call him to account for his wickedness ….
Yahweh is King forever and always!
Psalms 10:15–16

Amen!

SOURCE: Guardian