GP, the names of keris that supposedly bear thumb or finger prints is "Pejetan" in Jawa; the word "pejet" means to press with the thumb or finger, in common usage a "pejetan" is a pushbutton.
These little keris also occur in parts of Malaysia and the Riau Archipelago where they are called "Keris Picit", this is given in English as "Keris Pichit"; the word "picit" is a Malay word and it means 'to pinch or to squeeze'.
I do not know the original purpose of these keris-like blades, but since colonial times they have been regarded as talismans. I do not know of any particular talismanic function that they are associated with, but they are regarded as being an overall positive talisman.
Most keris pejetan that we meet with have been created with tools, and are usually quite recent. A very, very few keris pejetan have the probability of having been created by finger pressure of the maker. In the final analysis we have no way at all of knowing which keris genuinely bears finger/thumb prints, and which was created with a ball-pein hammer.
I have had a lot of these keris pass through my hands. I kept a couple of the ones that I believed might have been genuine, and these were included in my sub-collection of similar talismanic keris (k. sajen, k. sombro). I sold this collection some years ago to a gentleman who has included it in a collection to go into a university museum.
I still have one keris pejetan which also happens to be a keris sombro.
Keris sombro are believed to assist in childbirth if placed under the bed of a woman who is about to give birth.
The indentation on the blade of a keris pejetan is in most cases created with some tool or other, usually a hammer, however, there are a very few that might have been created by finger pressure. There were probably several ways in which this could have been done, but it definitely can be done. The blades of these keris are usually paper thin and a working smith would have both the strength and the toughness of skin necessary to compress paper thin red hot metal between his thumb & a finger.
The experimentation that David refers to involved forging a piece of material as thin as I could get it, then holding it at red heat above a bed of sand, hitting it with a wet finger tip as fast as possible. I created a dent in the material, I did not hurt myself, and the skin on my hands is not the skin of a working smith. It can be done.
It is impossible to confirm authenticity.
It is possible to form an opinion on authenticity if one has a very great deal of experience in this field.
This experience could be in either the visible characteristics of the blade, or in detection of esoteric qualities.
I had two Indonesian relatives, both now passed, who were acknowledged as having the power to detect if an object possessed some sort of esoteric power. One of these relatives claimed that he had encountered a couple of these small talismanic keris-like objects that did have some sort of "isi" (content), but the other, who was a much more highly regarded practitioner in the field of mysticism, claimed that he had never encountered any "isi" in any of these keris-like objects that he had had in his possession, according to him, this type of thing was very likely to be empty.
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