What might these symbols mean? We can’t know. There are so many mysteries at Lascaux: Why, for instance, are there no paintings of reindeer, which we know were the primary source of food for the Paleolithic humans who lived in that cave? Why is the human form so rarely depicted?* Why are certain areas of the cave filled with images, including pictures on the ceiling that required the building of scaffolding to create, while other areas have only a few paintings? And were the paintings spiritual? Here are our sacred animals. Or were they practical? Here is a guide to some of the animals that might kill you.

At Lascaux, there are also some “negative hand stencils,” as they are known to art historians. These paintings were created by pressing one hand with fingers splayed against the wall of the cave, and then blowing pigment, leaving the area around the hand painted. Similar hand stencils have been found in caves around the world. We’ve found memories of hands from up to forty thousand years ago from Indonesia to Australia to Africa to the Americas. These hand stencils remind us of how different life was in the distant past—amputations, likely from frostbite, were common in Europe, and so you often see negative hand stencils with three or four fingers. Life was difficult and often short: As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth, and around 50 percent of children did not live to the age of five.

But the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours. More than that, we know they were like us in other ways. These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

We see all kinds of hands—child and adult—stenciled on cave walls around the world, but almost always the fingers are spread, like my kids’ hand stencils. I’m no Jungian, but it’s fascinating and a little strange that so many Paleolithic humans, who couldn’t possibly have had any contact with one another, created the same types of paintings using similar techniques—techniques that we are still using to paint hand stencils.

But then again, what the Lascaux art means to me is likely different from whatever it meant to the people who made it. The paeloanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has theorized that the abstract dots and squiggles found in cave paintings may have been an early form of written language, with a consistent set of meanings even across broad distances.

What was the motivation for the negative hand stencils? Perhaps they were part of religious rituals, or rites of passage. Some academics theorize that the hand stencils were part of hunting rituals. Or maybe the hand is just a convenient model situated at the end of the wrist. To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”