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Prehistoric people in Brazil carved drawings into the rock next to dinosaur footprints, suggesting they may have been meaningful or interesting, a new study has found.
The rock carvings, which archaeologists call petroglyphs, are at a site called Serrote do Letreiro in Paraíba, an agricultural state on the eastern side of Brazil. Researchers first noticed the marks in 1975. But they are now understood to belong to the footprints after recent field surveys aided by drones, which uncovered carvings that have never been seen before. The tracks belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, which ended 66 million years ago.
“People tend to think that the Natives were not aware of their environment or that they did not have any kind of scientific spirit or curiosity,” said study co-author Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. “But that’s not true. It is very clear that they were interested in the trackers. We’ll never know if they knew about dinosaurs, but they were obviously curious about the prints and thought they made sense in some way.”
The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs are not the first examples of rock art found near dinosaur prints, but the study’s authors said they believe the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular site could have significant implications. on palaeontology,. archeology and cultural heritage studies.
Geometric shapes
It is not clear how long ago the petroglyphs were made. But the study – published in March in the journal Scientific Reports – notes that radiocarbon dating has found burial sites in the area to be between 9,400 and 2,620 years old, suggesting that the tribes that left them to live during that time.
“These people probably lived in small communities, using natural rock shelters that are very abundant in the area,” said Troiano.
“This region in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia – it’s very hot and there’s no shade, so it’s not easy to stand there and carve the rock. It requires a lot of effort, so when they chose this site, they were very deliberate,” he said. “They could have used so many other rock outcrops in the environment, but they chose this one.”
The drawings vary in style, suggesting that multiple artists may have had a hand in them. Some have shapes reminiscent of plants, while others have geometric shapes, including squares, rectangles and circles. There are crosses or lines inside the circles, which can look like stars, Troiano said. However, what these markings mean is a mystery.
“They all seem abstract, and if they represented something to the people who made them, we don’t know what it is,” he said.
The tracks at Serrote do Letreiro belong to three types of dinosaurs: theropods, sauropods and ornithopods. The researchers suspect that the people who carved the rock may have mistaken some for footprints of raccoons – large native birds such as ostriches, which have tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs.
It is more difficult to imagine what the prehistoric people could have thought of the sauropod prints, which left some of the largest herbivorous dinosaurs that ever lived, and therefore unlike any animal they knew. on them. Probably for this reason, the intentional connection between the drawings and certain prints is not so clear, the study noted.
Dinosaur rituals
Troiano said he believes the marks may have been left during a community meeting.
“I think the creation of rock art was embedded in some sort of ritualistic context: people gathering and creating something, perhaps using some psychotropics. We have a plant called jurema, which is hallucinogenic, and it is still used today,” he said. “We can speculate that people were also using it in the past because it is so abundant and common in the region. I think they were interested in what the footprints represented, and probably recognized them as footprints. They noticed it wasn’t random.”
There are other sites, Troiano said, with petroglyphs in the vicinity of dinosaur footprints — in the United States and Poland — but they are not showing “anywhere near the same level of intentionality,” he said. Intent is defined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints but also whether they overlap or not. If they don’t overlap, it suggests “thinking” on the part of the makers, the study suggests.
Troiano added that he is working on a follow-up paper that will go deeper into the interpretation and analysis of the Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs, building on the results of the current study.
The drawings’ direct association with dinosaur fossil tracks is unique and may shed more light on the significance, meaning and importance of rock art, according to Radosław Palonka, associate professor of archeology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who ‘worked on such. petroglyphs but was not involved in the study.
“The fact that the locations of the rock art panels were specifically chosen shows, among other things, that representatives of the communities that created rock paintings or petroglyphs often placed them very close to older images left by other cultures,” Palonka said by email. “This was the case in various parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and it is clearly visible, among others, in the Southwest of North America / Southwest of the USA, where my scientific interests are focused.”
Jan Simek, distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, agreed. “The paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people noticed and incorporated landscape fossils into their religious experiences and interpretations,” said Simek, who was only involved in the new study of petroglyphs.
“The science historian (Stanford University) Adrienne Meara showed how the ancient Greeks and Romans saw fossils as evidence of giants and monsters from their own mythologies and how the indigenous peoples of North America saw their origin stories in the fossils they saw scattered throughout their their landscape,’ Simek said via email. “The case of Brazil is another archeological example of this human tendency to associate the spiritual world created in the imagination with unexplained things in the world around us.”
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