Finger print signatures in widespread use

I believe that in some parts of India finger or thumb prints made visible with ink were used as a form of signature.

Could this have happened in Europe and China and other places with literacy?

What effects would this have?

Would the awareness of latent prints on other items have been used earlier in criminal investigations?

If registering one's finger print did not have the negative (being a criminal or at least a suspect) implications that it has in Britain would crime have become harder?
 
I believe that in some parts of India finger or thumb prints made visible with ink were used as a form of signature.

Could this have happened in Europe and China and other places with literacy?

What effects would this have?

Would the awareness of latent prints on other items have been used earlier in criminal investigations?

If registering one's finger print did not have the negative (being a criminal or at least a suspect) implications that it has in Britain would crime have become harder?

Its used in many societies where illiteracy is/were common.

Crime would become harder - using fingerprints to solve crimes didn't enter the Danish police until 1900.
With fingerprints being used as a sig somebody might quite early on be driven to try and copy prints of powerful persons to achive rights or whatever - but that would have the opposite result of having peoples guard/control sigs. You'd have a staff ready to validate fingerprints if need be.
Surely somebody would discover the nature of fingerprints and classify them as happened OTL just earlier.
Might speed up the judicial process of courts putting faint in evidence instead of having 12 men of good standing swear to your innocence.

Looking for prints on/in other materials than the obvious - blood, dust, glass, metal - would be another process until somebody tried to pull off a print of a glass or metal surface.

As to if it could happen in places with literacy - well people tend to show they're able to write but perhaps being enforced on illiterate peoples or on newly conquered ones... But OTL speaks another language...Charlemagne used put print an X...

Find a way to keep literacy at bay and you might get it going, I'm afraid...;)
 
I do not know if one is allowed to bump one's own threads but I still think that this is an interesting idea.

Besides the issue of crimes being solved once latent prints were discovered I wonder if there is a risk that literacy would actually be retarded if a reliable other 'signature' were discovered. Many people have been taught simply to write their names at the start of learning.
 

ninebucks

Banned
I don't think this would be very practical. Individual fingerprints look more alike than they look different. Identifying a person's fingerprint in a single glance is next to impossible, unlike signatures which are instantly recognisable even to the illiterate.
 
Fingerprinting is also common in developed modern societies. Oftentimes people who work in high-security jobs, like in a bank for example, will be fingerprinted after being hired. This is in addition to any legal forms a person would sign before beginning employment.
 
Top