Ancient artists' gender is a mystery

摘要

Efforts to infer the sex of ancient hand-painting artists by comparing their prints with those of modern humans could be flawed, according to a team in the Czech Republic. Patrik Galeta and his colleagues at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen studied the handprints of 50 modern men and 50 modern women from France. An analysis of data, including the length of the hand and fingers, correctly identified the sex to which the print belonged in 92% of cases, but only 54% could be classified with 95% certainty. When the authors used a method previously developed using US handprints, 100% of French female prints were successfully classified, compared with only 58% of those belonging to French males; this discrepancy is mainly due to differences in hand size between the US and French populations.