Tiny handprints that date back some 8,000 years were actually made by lizards, scientists said.
The site of Wadi Sura II was discovered in Egypt’s Western Desert back in 2002. At the time, researchers were stunned to find thousands of decorations on the walls of the rock shelter—some of which dated back thousands of years.
Along with designs showing wild animals, human figures, and headless creatures, researchers also found the outlines of numerous human handprints—which had never been seen before at a Saharan rock site.
But anthropologists recently revealed that the handprints were not made by small humans.
Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, one of the anthropologists, told National Geographic she was initially “shocked” by the shape of the small hand outlines when she first saw them.
“They were much smaller than human baby hands, and the fingers were too long,” she explained.
She compared measurements from the hands of newborn human infants, as well as newborn premature babies—and the results, which were published earlier this year in the Journal of Archaeological Science., show there’s an extremely low probability that the “baby” hands in the so-called Cave of the Beasts are actually human.
