CNRS, IKER UMR 5478, Aquitaine, France.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 May 10;376(1824):20200205. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0205. Epub 2021 Mar 22.
Several Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites from the Gravettian period display hand stencils with missing fingers. On the basis of the stencils that Leroi-Gourhan identified in the cave of Gargas (France) in the late 1960s, we explore the hypothesis that those stencils represent hand signs with deliberate folding of fingers, intentionally projected as a negative figure onto the wall. Through a study of the biomechanics of handshapes, we analyse the articulatory effort required for producing the handshapes under the stencils in the Gargas cave, and show that only handshapes that are articulable in the air can be found among the existing stencils. In other words, handshape configurations that would have required using the cave wall as a support for the fingers are not attested. We argue that the stencils correspond to the type of handshape that one ordinarily finds in sign language phonology. More concretely, we claim that they correspond to signs of an 'alternate' or 'non-primary' sign language, like those still employed by a number of bimodal (speaking and signing) human groups in hunter-gatherer populations, like the Australian first nations or the Plains Indians. In those groups, signing is used for hunting and for a rich array of ritual purposes, including mourning and traditional story-telling. We discuss further evidence, based on typological generalizations about the phonology of non-primary sign languages and comparative ethnographic work, that points to such a parallelism. This evidence includes the fact that for some of those groups, stencil and petroglyph art has independently been linked to their sign language expressions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
一些旧石器时代晚期的考古遗址中都发现了有残缺手指的手印。基于 20 世纪 60 年代末勒鲁瓦-古尔汉在法国加尔加洞穴中发现的手模，我们探讨了这样一种假设，即这些手模代表了故意折叠手指的手势，意图以负像的形式投射到墙上。通过对手形的生物力学研究，我们分析了在加尔加洞穴中手模下产生手形所需的关节用力，并表明在现有的手模中只能找到可以在空中形成的手形。换句话说，无法找到需要使用洞穴墙壁来支撑手指的手形配置。我们认为，这些手模与通常在手语语音学中发现的手形类型相对应。更具体地说，我们声称它们与“交替”或“非主要”手语的手势相对应，就像一些仍然在狩猎采集人群中的双语（说话和手语）群体中使用的手势一样，如澳大利亚原住民或平原印第安人。在这些群体中，手语用于狩猎和丰富的仪式目的，包括哀悼和传统故事讲述。我们进一步讨论了基于非主要手语语音学的类型学概括和比较民族志工作的进一步证据，这些证据表明存在这种平行关系。这些证据包括这样一个事实，即对于其中一些群体，模板和岩石艺术已经与他们的手语表达独立相关。本文是“重建史前语言”主题问题的一部分。
