Thousands of years ago, a group of people began painting the rocks of a cave in the south of the world with red, yellow, white and black pigments. The designs, particularly geometric shapes, accumulated over time. However, the exact date on which the drawings were created was previously unknown when, after more than a decade of work, a group of Argentine, Chilean and American scientists managed to date the cave paintings of Huenul-1 Cave in Argentine Patagonia. . According to a study published this Wednesday in the journal Science, artistic production began there 8,200 years ago. The age that archaeologists have been able to determine predates previous records by several millennia, making the images among the oldest yet dated in South America.
“It is a milestone for the record of rock art in South America,” says archaeologist Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, lead author of the research published in Science, a major scientific magazine. The archaeologist explains that much of the world's rock art is relatively dated, meaning that a known chronology is associated with other evidence from the same site or related sites. Romero Villanueva explains that it is a valid method for assigning temporality, but the direct dating that the archaeologist's team used is more precise. “These studies are very complex and do not always produce good results,” explains the scientist.
Part of the paintings in Huenul Cave 1.Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)
A series of “strokes of luck” accompanied the scientists’ work and enabled them to analyze the materials directly. “There were enough coal masses and there were no layers of pollution,” explains Romero Villanueva. Carbon-14 dating produced the results published in Science magazine. According to the four measurements 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 ran statistical modeling that allowed them to determine the start of artistic production in the cave 8,200 years ago.
Romero Villanueva, a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought, began analyzing the artistic expressions on the walls of the Huenul 1 cave a decade ago, together with Ramiro Barberena, until the 1970s and 1980s For years there were hardly any research results. The archaeologist estimated that most of the artistic production occurred during the period 2,000 years ago, when the cave was most intensively inhabited. “The surprise was that some of the reasons [las pinturas] “They are very early,” says Romero Villanueva.
Due to the amount and variety of rock images it contains, the formation is unique in the region. Located in the north of Argentina's Neuquén province, the cave features more than 440 motifs painted with diluted pigments and applied with fingers or another device. The drawings are primarily geometric shapes printed on rocks at different times in the artist's creation, separated by hundreds of years. However, scholars have noted a “continuity in the style, colors and materials” used in the making of the paintings, making the area a “permanent place,” that is, a space that different populations occupied repeatedly.
The men and women who visited the cave were hunters and gatherers who inhabited it for short and not very intense but recurring episodes. These periods occurred primarily in the late phases of the Holocene, the geological epoch that continues to this day. While these people lived there, a “period of extreme drought” exposed them to “new conditions” and forced them to “develop strategies to be resilient,” says Romero Villanueva. The art on the stones was crucial in this process.
The volcanic desert around the cave. Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)
A strategy for socio-ecological resilience
The scientists suggest that “standardized imagery events” that spanned more than 130 generations in the Patagonian cave studied by Romero Villanueva and his team “aimed at maintaining large-scale safety nets, storing information enshrined in collective memory, and to ensure social preservation”. Tradition.” “Rock art (…) facilitated social and biological connectivity in a hostile and sparsely populated landscape,” says the study. In this way, adds Romero Villanueva, it was possible to learn “very valuable lessons about human strategies”.
Romero Villanueva clarifies that “the specific information” of the paintings on the walls of Huenul 1 cave “has been lost” and their meaning “cannot be recovered from archeology.” However, he specifies: “The studies suggest that this was ecological and social information.” For example, it was important to know where human populations existed and whether the connections to them were good or where the resources were available. “Transmitting this information into a permanent medium has helped to make the landscape more livable and, above all, has been of great benefit to future generations,” adds the scientist.
“Knowing what happened and how similar problems were solved before can be a lifeline and a driver for building human resilience,” the scientist continues. “All this information collected has the potential to reveal more or less successful models for dealing 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 greatest challenges facing humanity today.” Although its severity might suggest that it is unprecedented, human societies have faced it a variety of socio-ecological challenges.”
The view from Huenul Cave 1. Guadalupe Romero Villanueva (AAAS)