Cave paintings in NE Brazil
In Brazil several years ago, on a totally unrelated project, a local we were working with offered to take us to see some cave paintings. We ended up driving several hours inland. The landscape was remote and amazing.
Everywhere was sandstone rock formations including impossible monuments of stone stacked on top of stone. To look at it, you would swear that it could only have been done by human hands and heavy machinery. But it wasn’t. Wind, water and millennia have left the rocks where they are and will eventually return them to sand.
But the amazing part of it all was inside a couple of the huge standing rocks. Ancient artists had chosen those cramped caves as a place to record their lives. In a search online, I found a similar drawing in Toca do Boqueirao da Pedra Furada, Brazil. It's in the same general area, too. Anthropologists weren’t sure if it represented a family unit or maybe a group of hunters.
Other paintings in the cave represented stylized animals as well. Those paintings were dated as approximately 25,000 years old. Although there is another school of thought that they could be as much as 36,000 years old.
Of course, there were signs of modern human touches, too. Someone had drawn a heart nearby. Probably with lipstick.
Just last night I was reading this article in National Geographic “How a molar, jawbone, and pinkie are rewriting human history” and I was amazed how much the science on our hominid ancestors has changed just since I was in school. The techniques they are using today with DNA and other techniques to identify various families that were distinctly different are amazing. Much of it is turning the world on its ear.
Traditional science has generally believed South America was the last place to be inhabited by Homo sapiens as the migration into the Americas began after hominids crossed the land bridge between Russia and Alaska in the Bering Straits. But various techniques place them in the area earlier than originally thought, raising the questions of when they arrived in the first place. This potentially throws much of the science we grew up with into flux.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about the cave paintings and rock structures I saw that day. I believe it was in the state of Piauí based on the presence of other cave paintings in the area and similar topography. That said, I would be interested in learning more if any readers are experts in the field.
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