Rock Art Research

Upper Palaeolithic hand stencils at Cosquer Cave have been interpreted as forming a numeric code. The present analysis examined ‘digits’ at Cosquer and Gargas from the perspectives of modern ethnography, shared cognitive functioning and human hand anatomy, concluding that correspondences between the 27 000-year-old hand stencils and modern fingercounting practices, including the use of so-called biomechanically infeasible hand positions, are unlikely due to chance; thus, the hand stencils may indeed represent integers. Images of finger-signs may provide an additional avenue for interpreting Palaeolithic quantification.