Mysterious ‘comb’ drawings may be among oldest cave paintings in South America

The soaring stone walls of Argentina’s Huenul Cave, a 630-meter-square rock shelter in northern Patagonia, are covered by nearly 900 distinct paintings of geometric shapes, people, and animals. In vivid shades of red, white, yellow, and black, their style resembles those of rock art found elsewhere in Patagonia, estimated to be a few thousand years old at most. But to the trained eye of Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, an archaeologist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), some of the Huenul Cave paintings seemed older than the rest: A handful of badly weathered, comb-shaped motifs had been traced on the wall in reddish black pigment and nearly obscured by later cave painters. A team of researchers led by Romero Villanueva radiocarbon dated tiny samples of charcoal mixed into the rock art’s pigments. Today in Science Advances , they report that the oldest painting dates back 8200 years . That makes the motif—shaped like a downward-facing comb with four teeth—the oldest directly dated rock art painting in South America. Dates from similar motifs in the cave span the subsequent 3000 years, implying people visited the cave repeatedly and continued the artistic tradition for many generations. “Now, we have precise chronology with which we can begin to model the colonization of this area,” says University of Buenos Aires archaeologist Luis Borrero, who was not part of the res...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news