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A drift ’s worth of rock art decorating the inside of a cave in Argentina is several millennia older than once thought and comprise hundreds of drawing that span 100 generations .
At one meter , archaeologists go steady the art — located in Patagonia , a region in South America ’s southern tip — as being only several thousand years quondam . But a new analysis has revealed that some of the works actually go out to as early as 8,200 years ago and were create during the late Holocene epoch ( 11,700 twelvemonth ago to present ) , accord to a study bring out Wednesday ( Feb. 14 ) in the journalScience Advances .
Examples of some of the rock art found inside a cave in Patagonia.
" It turned out to be several millennium older than we expected , " study lead authorGuadalupe Romero Villanueva , an archaeologist with the Argentine National Research Council ( CONICET ) and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought ( INAPL ) , order Live Science . " We got surprised . "
To determine the appointment of the monumental nontextual matter , which portray human beings , animals and other designs , archaeologists come off away several small pieces of black paint from the drawing . Since the pigment was made from plant life material , researchers usedradiocarbon datingto determine the age of the cave artistry .
" It ’s usually really severe to engagement stone art unless it has an organic component , otherwise there really is n’t any material that you could date , " bailiwick co - authorRamiro Barberena , an archaeologist at Temuco Catholic University in Chile and CONICET , tell Live Science . " [ The cave ] is not the quondam occupancy in South America , but it is the oldest directly radiocarbon - date pigment - based John Rock art in South America . "
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Throughout the total cave internet site , archeologist reckon 895 unique picture aggroup into 446 motif , or segments . While research stay on inconclusive as to which cultures make the dramatic imagery , researchers think that the elaborated work may have been used to overtake along information between the illustrators and other community , as well as future generations .
" These [ drawings ] span more or less across 3,000 years within a single motif , " Barberena say . " We pop the question that there was a transmission of information across multiple human generations , which live the same neighborhood and the same web site . "
While it ’s unclear if the cave art was make as part of a " ceremony or an intergroup meeting , we think it was part of a human strategy to build social web across disperse group , which conduce to making these club more live against a very ambitious ecology , " Barberena lend .
During the late Holocene , this region of Patagonia was known for being very teetotal and spicy , according to the written report .
" There were expectant parts of the landscape painting without water , but so as to survive as hunter - gatherers , they would have needed to quell connected , " Barberena said . " It would ’ve been hard to make it on your own , so an exchanging of information was important . "
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While there are other rock music art sites in the region , the researchers said that the cave has the high concentration , by far .
" It ’s amazing the amount of rock art we launch there , " Romero Villanueva said . " In the environ landscape there are several rock art web site , but none of them have the amount of the diversity in shapes and colors found here . So , it ’s discernible that this home was likely a red-hot spot for communication in the past and crucial for the survivability of these societies . "
Even though this is the old paint - base cave art found on the continent , it ’s not the oldest in the Earth . That record belong to a45,500 - twelvemonth - old drawing off of a warty pigscrawled onto a cave wall in Indonesia .
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