I LOVE THIS ARTICLE THE END.

Nidhi Subbaraman, you are THE BEST: "Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women."

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.

This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they'd find on their hunt, and it's widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.

But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.

"The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks.

Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it's possible that "had something to do with it."

That little italicized that is my favorite thing. It's possible that had something to do with it. *thatface* Love. Looooooooooooooove. Love.

Anyway. I also love this article because of its subject, which is super cool, and because, once upon a time, I was an 18-year-old university student in an archeology class who asked her male professor: "Why are the handprints assumed to be male?" To which my male professor replied, after a stunned silence that quickly morphed into a seething resentment: "Because why would anyone assume they weren't?"

He taught me something very valuable that day. Not what he'd intended, I suspect.