Just found this, it’s neat if you like the idea that some of the aliens who edited proto-human/primate DNA were reptilians:
[b][url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469858/Tiny-handprints-Stone-Age-shelter-NOT-human-8-000-year-old-baby-stencils-Cave-Beasts-created-lizards.html]Tiny handprints in Stone Age shelter were NOT human: 8,000-year-old ‘baby’ stencils in Cave of Beasts were created by lizards[/url][/b]
● Amateur explorers stumbled across the Egyptian cave in 2002
● Found 13 prints they believed were created by the hands of human babies
● New study has found hands are too small and fingers too long to be human
● Hunters may have held up lizards to make prints - but it is not known why
A study of 13 tiny hand imprints in a Saharan cave have revealed that they are not human.
Amateur explorers stumbled across the ‘Cave of Beasts’ in 2002, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt’s southwest border with Libya.
The cave, which is also known as Wadi Sura II, includes 5,000 images that were painted or engraved into stone around 8,000 years ago.
Among the images are what were believed to be stencilled hands and feet of children – but new research now claims they may have been created by lizards.
Anthropologist Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research said she was stunned when she saw the shape of the small prints.
‘They were much smaller than human baby hands, and the fingers were too long,’ she told National Geographic.
Honoré compared measurements taken from the hand outlines in the cave with those taken from the hands of newborn human infants of around 37 to 41 weeks old.
She also included measurements taken from newborn premature babies that were 26 to 36 weeks old.
Honoré discovered that there is an ‘extremely low probability’ that the hands in the Cave of the Beasts were human.
Instead, she believe they may have been created by the forelegs of desert monitor lizards or, possibly, the feet of young crocodiles.
If her analysis is correct, then this is the first time such animal imprints have been discovered in the Sahara desert.
‘[This raises new perspectives for understanding the rock art at Wadi Sūra, and the behaviour and symbolic universe of the populations who made it,’ she writes in her study, published in the journal Archaeological Science
The ‘Cave of Beasts’ is 6 miles (10 km) from the ‘Cave of the Swimmers’, but with far more, and better preserved, images.
The Eastern Sahara, a region the size of Western Europe that extends from Egypt into Libya, Sudan and Chad, is the world’s largest warm, dry desert.
Rainfall in the desert’s centre averages less than 2 millimetres a year, but the region was once much less arid.
About 8500 BC, seasonal rainfall appeared in the region, attracting hunter-gatherers.
By 5300 BC, the rains had stopped and human settlements receded to highland areas. By 3500 BC, the settlements disappeared entirely.
The mass exodus corresponds with the rise of sedentary life along the Nile that later blossomed into pharaonic civilisation that dominated the region for thousands of years.
It is believed hunter gathers held up the creatures to make the prints, many of which were found alongside adult sized human hand stencils.
But according to the National Geographic, Honoré is reluctant to speculate on why such a civilisation would imprint the legs of animals on their cave walls.
‘It’s very challenging for us as researchers to interpret these paintings since we have a culture that’s totally different [from the one that created it],’ she said.
Source (with lots of good photos btw) - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469858/Tiny-handprints-Stone-Age-shelter-NOT-human-8-000-year-old-baby-stencils-Cave-Beasts-created-lizards.html
So this is suggesting that along with taking prints of their own hands, a very symbolic thing in a pre-selfie age where what you could DO mattered more than how you looked, these dudes were holding up the resident lizards, and taking prints of THEIR “hands”…
One would think they’d hold up the hearts, severed heads, or horns of prey animals, if they just wanted stone age trophy art, so I find this quite intriguing, and the photos on that page show how they aligned the possibly lizardy forepaws with their own hands.