    
Gerald Clough (Unregistered Guest)
Unregistered guest
Posted From: dell-ics1.oag.state.tx.us
| | Posted on Monday, June 16, 2008 - 12:01 pm: | 
|
If you search the internet on Yahoo or Google for the keywords ANCIENT FINGERPRINTS, you will find several ancient uses. The Chinese used a fingerprint as a signature on important documents, and fingerprints appear on some ancient middle eastern seals. You will also find ancient rock carvings that suggest ancients in different parts of the world recognized something of fingerprints. We can't know how close they came to recognizing that each person's was unique, but they do seem to have thought of them as have a special relationship to the person. That's the problem with ancient matters. We don't know much about how much ancient peoples knew. We just know how they used fingerprints. The Chinese at least knew that there were differences among people's prints. I think they knew very well that they were unique, or at least that it was unlikely that one person's prints would be be mistaken for another persons. At the same time, they could have simply felt that leaving an impression of one's finger bound the person to honor the contract, because something personal of theirs was now attached to it. It's tricky guessing what long dead people really thought. Archeologists today are using fingerprints in ancient pottery to learn how things were traded by matching the same potter's prints on pieces found in different locations.
Also look at ancientfingerprints.org |