The oldest rock art production in South America began 8,200 years ago

Thousands of years ago, a group of humans began to paint the rocks of a cave in the south of the world with red, yellow, white and black pigments.

The designs, especially geometric shapes, accumulated over time.

But the precise date on which the drawings were made was unknown until now, when a group of Argentine, Chilean and an American scientists have managed to date the cave paintings of the Huenul 1 cave, in Argentine Patagonia, after more than a decade of work. .

Artistic production began there 8,200 years ago, according to research published this Wednesday in the journal

Science.

The antiquity that archaeologists have managed to establish precedes previous records by several millennia and places the images as the oldest in South America dated so far.

“It is a milestone for the records of rock art in South America,” says archaeologist Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, lead author of the research published in

Science,

one of the great magazines dedicated to science.

The archaeologist explains that much of the rock art in the world is dated relatively, that is, associating a known chronology with other evidence from the same site or related sites.

It is a valid way of assigning a temporality, explains Romero Villanueva, but direct dating, which was used by the team led by the archaeologist, is more precise.

“These studies are very complex and there are not always good results,” the scientist clarifies.

A part of the paintings in the Huenul cave 1.Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)

A series of “lucky breaks” accompanied the scientists' work and allowed them to analyze the materials directly.

“There was enough mass of coal and there were no layers of contamination,” explains Romero Villanueva.

Carbon 14 dating yielded the results published in

Science

magazine .

According to the four measurements that the archaeologists were able to make, the oldest painting they analyzed dates back to about 7,600 years ago and the other three are dated to about 6,200, 5,600 and 3,000 years ago, according to the data calibrated by the scientists.

To further refine this information, the researchers did statistical modeling that allowed them to pinpoint the beginning of artistic production in the cave 8,200 years ago.

Romero Villanueva, who is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought, began analyzing the art expressions on the walls of the Huenul 1 cave a decade ago together with Ramiro Barberena—the Little previous research dated back to the 1970s and 1980s.

The archaeologist estimated that most of the artistic production had been made during the moments of greatest intensity of occupation of the cave, 2,000 years ago.

“The surprise was that some of the motifs [the paintings] are very early,” says Romero Villanueva.

Due to the quantity and variety of rock images it contains, the formation is unique in the region.

The cave, located in the north of the Argentine province of Neuquén, has more than 440 motifs painted with diluted pigments and applied with fingers or some utensil.

The drawings are mainly geometric shapes printed on rocks at different moments of artistic creation separated by hundreds of years.

Scientists have identified, however, a “continuity in the style, colors and materials” used in the production of the paintings, which turns the area into a “persistent place”, that is, a space that different populations occupied. repeatedly.

The men and women who frequented the cave were hunters and gatherers who occupied it in brief and not very intense but recurring episodes.

These periods occurred, above all, in late moments of the Holocene, the geological period that continues to the present day.

While these humans lived there, a “period of extreme aridity” exposed them to “new conditions” and forced them to “generate strategies to be resilient,” says Romero Villanueva.

The art on the stones was crucial in that process.

The volcanic desert around the cave. Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)

A strategy for socioecological resilience

The scientists suggest that “standardized pictorial events” that spanned more than 130 generations in the Patagonian cave studied by Romero Villanueva and his team “sought to maintain large-scale safety nets, storing information rooted in collective memory and guaranteeing social preservation.” beyond oral tradition.”

“Rock art (...) facilitated social and biological connectivity in a hostile and sparsely populated landscape,” the study indicates.

In this way, adds Romero Villanueva, it made it possible to transmit “very valuable lessons about human strategies.”

Romero Villanueva clarifies that “the specific information” of the paintings on the walls of the Huenul 1 cave “is lost” and its meaning “is not recoverable from archaeology.”

However, he specifies: “The studies allow us to infer that what they transmitted was ecological and social information.”

It was important, for example, to know where there were human populations and whether the links with them were good or where the resources were.

“Translating this information into a durable medium helped make the landscape more livable and, above all, was very useful to future generations,” adds the scientist.

“Knowing what happened and how similar problems were solved before can be a lifeline and an engine for building human resilience,” the scientist continues.

“All this accumulated information has the potential to show more or less successful models to deal with events such as climate change,” says Romero Villanueva.

The study published in

Science

concludes with this idea: “Increasing social resilience to change is one of the main challenges facing humanity today.

Although its severity may suggest that it is unprecedented, human societies have faced a host of socio-ecological challenges.”

The view from the Huenul cave 1.Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)

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