The rock art of Patagonia dates back to 8,200 years before the present, according to drawings found in a cave that are the oldest known in the region by direct dating, and it is believed that they could have helped transmit knowledge for generations.
A team of Argentine and Chilean scientists publishes in Science Advances the dating of this sample of rock art, which includes geometric and human shapes and a particularly interesting comb-shaped motif.
The experts evaluated motifs and pigments from 895 paintings, along with artifacts such as shell beads and guanaco bones recovered from the Huenul 1 cave in northeastern Argentine Patagonia.
Some of these cave paintings have been dated with carbon 14, which places them at 8,200 years ago, compared to other known remains in Patagonia, possibly older, but it has not been possible to directly determine when they were created.
Patagonia was one of the last regions in the world to be colonized by modern humans, about 12,000 years ago.
The paintings correspond to the middle Holocene, which in South America was a “tremendously arid period, much more so than now and very hot.”
This is what one of the authors of the study, Ramiro Barberena, from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (Conicet) and the Catholic University of Temuco (Chile) explains to EFE.
The expert indicates that humans have already arrived in America with the ability to make cave art, but what is interesting is to see in what situations societies “decide to start marking the landscape they inhabit with that art, because that can give information about the social context.” and ecological.”
The paintings analyzed are different shades of yellow, white and black. Of them, Barberena highlights one in the shape of a comb and that the dating indicates that they were made in three different moments that cover a period of just over 3,000 years (between 8,000 and 5,000 before our era).
In that period of time, the comb shape is repeated and it can be said that it is “the same motif, made with the same type of pigment (black) and the same technique, which shows that there is continuity.”
Barberena says the team believes there were “dozens of human generations between which a transmission of information occurred.”
“Although – he continues – we do not know what it was, but we can propose a level of cultural transmission marked by this tradition of making rock art.”
That period in which the same geometric motif was repeated in the cave coincides with the middle Holocene, a time “ecologically very difficult and very demanding for human societies” that lived in Patagonia.
Their populations were hunter-gatherers who went through a period of very low demographics. “Few people faced homogeneous and very climatically challenging landscapes.”
Given these conditions, the authors of the study consider that for these populations “it was essential” to have social networks that united them and allowed communication and exchanges.
Communication networks that – adds Barberena – had to “be anchored to specific points in space.” In this case, the Huenul 1 cave, where encounters between populations took place, which at that time must have been of “enormous importance and difficulty.”
This rock art emerged “in part as a resistant response to ecological stress by highly mobile and low-density populations,” indicates the first author of the study, Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, from Conicet, cited by Science Advances.
Those first human settlers of Patagonia passed on their traditional knowledge for more than a hundred generations during a period when arid climatic conditions threatened their survival, the team suggests.
Thus, Huenul 1 could have been the scene of ceremonies probably of ritual content, although not only. “Ultimately they contributed to these strategies for building human resilience in the face of this very particular socio-ecological context in the deserts of South America,” concludes Baberena.