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The First Known Artists were Women

 In 2013, Dean Snow of the University of Pennsylvania published research on sexual dimorphism of hand prints present in Upper Paleolithic cave art.  His analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of hand prints present in the European cave art analyzed belonged to women (source).  Marija Gimbutas and others write that in Old European religion caves represented the womb of the earth Goddess. 

Women, in the womb of the Earth Mother, creating artwork at the dawn of time.  The Creator creating creators, matrilineally.

Cave woman painting
The Creator original painting.  

Blogger Art Chester writes, "There is also an indirect argument based upon observations of modern primates.  Blogger Greg Laden, who studied with Prof. Snow at Penn State, states that when you study chimpanzees, you find that the males are virtually technophobes:

'Virtually all chimp technology is used by females, invented by females, passed from female to female, and so on.  Males don’t seem to do any of that.

"Thus if you believe that humans evolved from earlier primates, it’s not surprising if females were primary makers and users of many tools, including the tools used to create art.



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