兵马俑上有女人和少年留下的指纹

Have you ever seen many figures made of clay?

They are called the Terracotta Army.

They have faces, eyes, and hands.

Their faces, hands, and clothes are all made of clay.

Their bodies are all clay.

There are fingerprints on their hands.

Your hands are like their hands.

Fingerprints are on your hands.

If you look at your hand, you can see fingerprints.

Your fingerprints and mine are different.

The people in your home have fingerprints too.

Your friends have fingerprints too.

Everyone's fingerprints are different.

So a fingerprint can tell us who a person is.

The people who made the Terracotta Army used their hands to make clay figures.

Their fingerprints ended up on the clay figures.

The things you make have your fingerprints on them too.

These fingerprints have been on the Terracotta Army for many years.

For many years, nobody looked at these fingerprints.

Why did nobody look?

Because fingerprints are small, and many people cannot see them.

Fingerprints cannot speak.

But fingerprints can tell us a lot.

Now someone has looked.

Teachers from the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum and Shandong University studied 23 terracotta figures together.

These 23 figures are all in one small area.

They looked at the clay figures' heads and hands very slowly.

They looked very carefully.

On these 23 figures, they found 79 fingerprints.

The 79 fingerprints are all different.

Of the 79 fingerprints, 73 were left when the makers shaped the wet clay with their hands.

The other 6 were left when they used their hands to attach other clay pieces.

These 79 fingerprints come from many people.

For the first time, someone has seen these fingerprints.

In recent days, this news has been on many people's phones.

Long ago, many people believed the makers were men.

Everyone believed that many men made the Terracotta Army together.

Many books said the same thing.

What about women?

What about children?

Nobody thought about women.

Nobody thought about children either.

From one fingerprint, we cannot tell if the person was a man or a woman.

Many fingerprints together can show us many people.

Now computers have also examined these 79 fingerprints.

Computers look faster than people do.

The computer looked many times and then answered a question.

Were the makers men, women, or children?

The computer said there were men, women, and children.

Among the makers, 45.0% were men.

32.7% were women.

Another 22.3% were children under 15.

Men were the most numerous.

But women and children were not few.

Among the men's fingerprints, those of 20-year-olds were the most common.

A journal is a publication where many people write.

This research was published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.

But what the computer said is a likely estimate.

It describes a group of people, not one person.

We cannot tell which figure was made by one person.

We do not know which figure was made by a woman.

Nor which one was made by a child.

What they studied was one small area.

This small area is a tiny part of the whole Terracotta Army.

Other places have many figures too, and they did not study those.

So there is a lot more to study.

This is a beginning.

Among the makers there were men, women, and children.

Together, they made these figures.

Women and children may have worked on them too.

Many people had not thought of this new idea.

This idea is not in many books.

There is still much we do not know.

When you look at the Terracotta Army, you can look at their hands.

When you look at their hands, think about the people who made them.

When you are doing something, does your family come to help you?