8000-year-old Tiny Hand Prints NOT Made by humans

Hand prints by lizards?  Why not?  Wet ocher would have been available and a curious lizard will reach up.  Unless there is something else that is compelling we really have evidence of messy lizards obviously following up after a human incursion.

Otherwise this is a remarkable cave that is well decorated by ancient man well before significant settled lifeways emenrged.

all good.

Scientists discover 8000-year-old tiny hand prints in ancient cave were NOT made by humans

13:10, 1 Mar 2016 

Updated 16:11, 1 Mar 2016 

EMMANUELLE HONORÉ Engraving: the Wadi Sura II cave has 5,000 images that were painted or engraved into stone around 8,000 years earlier

By Siobhan McFadyen 

 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/scientists-discover-8000-year-old-7470047

Experts probing the discovery of 13 hand prints in the eerie Egyptian Cave of Beasts say the 8000-year-old stencils did not 

Anthropologists probing the discovery of tiny 8000-year-old hand prints in an Egyptian cave say they were not made by human hands.

Explorers stumbled across the tiny hand imprints in a Saharan cave after unearthing more than 5000 images carved into the stone in Egypt's southwest border with Libya 14 years ago.

But a study of the 13 tiny hand prints show that not only are they not human - but that they are believed to belong to tiny lizards.

The cave, which is also known as Wadi Sura II, has been the focus of study for Emmanuelle Honoré of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research for years.

 

Amazing: the walls are are covered with hundreds of hand stencils, as well as images of people, wild animals and unusual headless beasts 

She 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.

The scientists took measurements of the stencils and compared them to those of newborn human infants under a year, including newborn premature babies that were 26 to 36 weeks old.

But came to the startling conclusion that the prints were not human and instead were created by lizards.

But while Honoré is sure the prints were made by tiny crocodiles or lizards - she is unsure of the reason why they are there.

  

 Nile Monitor (Varanus niloticus) Or why any civilisation would want to draw or use the legs of animals on their cave walls.

She added: "It's very challenging for us as researchers to interpret these paintings since we have a culture that's totally different."

Situated in the Eastern Sahara, the Cave of Beasts is six miles from the renowned Cave of the Swimmers but it contains some of the most incredible archaeological images ever found.

The desert is the world's largest and is the size of Western Europe and goes from Egypt into Libya, Sudan and Chad.

It is one of the driest places on earth - but wouldn't have necessarily been so when the images were made - since there would have been water to sustain life.