 There's some exciting new research being published by Dean Snow from the Pennsylvania University and in that research he has examined a number of caves, paleolithic caves in Spain and in France. He's looking at cave paintings and they go back the paleolithic eras 25,000 years ago. People have been fascinated by the cave paintings for a very long period of time and the gender of who actually painted them is now open to debate. Our paleolithic ancestor artists were interested in painting animals and not in painting humans and the images that they created are glowing, beautiful and large and now we're finding out that perhaps some of these works were produced by women. Dean Snow made a series of studies of hands, the size of men's and women's hands but of course he had to go back to the paleolithic era to do that because our hand sizes are different. What he came up with was an intriguing suggestion that the hands of women are represented in the caves and the hands of women of course are not as large as those of men. Up until now there has been, as he says, a gender bias towards males as the sort of the first artist, our paleolithic artists but this new research shows that perhaps women were equal contributors with the men in fact. In one of the most famous caves, the Peshmerle Cave in France, it seems that 75% of the paintings there were done by women. The Peshmerle Cave is famous for this mural called the Spotted Horse Mural. I mean the artists depict these horses as wild glorious beasts and the two dappled horses sort of come before our eyes, they're like this sort of extraordinary dreamlike creatures. It's as though the paleolithic ancestors really respected the creatures that they hunted. After all, these creatures provided them with food, with clothes and what we see alongside the horses are the hand prints by male and female artists, a gesture of equality very rare in Western art. Perhaps Dean Snow's recent research will lead us to query the assumptions we've had about women's creativity and men's and see them as equal.