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Prehistoric people in Brazil carved drawings into rock next to dinosaur footprints, suggesting they may have found them meaningful or interesting, according to a new study.
The rock carvings, which archaeologists call petroglyphs, are found in an area called Serrote do Letreiro in Paraíba, an agricultural state at the eastern tip of Brazil. Researchers first observed the tracks in 1975. However, these are now interpreted to be related to footprints following recent field surveys with the help of drones that revealed previously unseen carvings. The tracks belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, which ended 66 million years ago.
“People often think that Indigenous people are not aware of their environment or do not have any scientific spirit or curiosity,” said study co-author Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. “But this is not true. It’s obvious they’re interested in footprints. “We will never know whether they knew about dinosaurs, but it is clear that they were curious about the tracks and thought they were meaningful in some way.”
The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs are not the first examples of rock art found in close proximity to dinosaur prints, but the study’s authors said they believe the unprecedented clarity of the relationship between the two in this particular area could have important implications for paleontology. archeology and cultural heritage studies.
Geometrical shapes
It is unclear how long ago the petroglyphs were made. However, the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports in March, states that radiocarbon dating determined that the burial sites in the region are between 9,400 and 2,620 years old, and suggests that the tribes that left these areas must have lived during this period.
“These people probably lived in small communities using natural rock shelters, which were abundant in the area,” Troiano said.
“This area in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia; It’s really 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 they were very conscious in choosing this place,” he added. “They could have used many other rock outcrops in the area, but they chose this one.”
The styles of the drawings are different, suggesting that more than one artist may have been involved. Some have shapes reminiscent of plants, while others resemble geometric forms such as squares, rectangles and circles. Inside the circles are crosses or lines that may resemble stars, Troiano said. But what these signs mean remains a mystery.
“They all seem abstract, and if they represent something to the people who make 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. Researchers suspect that people carving the rock may have mistaken some of these for the footprints of rheas, large native birds resembling ostriches with tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs.
It’s harder to imagine what prehistoric humans might have thought about the sauropod tracks left by some of the largest herbivorous dinosaurs that ever lived, and thus unlike any animal they knew. This is probably why the intentional relationship between the drawings and these particular prints is less clear, the study noted.
dinosaur rituals
Troiano said he believes the marks may have been left during mass gatherings.
“I think the creation of rock art was placed in a kind of ritual context: people coming together and creating something, perhaps using some psychotropic substances. “We have a hallucinogenic plant called Jurema and it is used to this day,” he said. “We can guess that people used it in the past as it is very abundant and widespread in the region. I think they were interested in what the footprints represented and I think they identified them as footprints. “They realized it wasn’t random.”
There are other sites in the United States and Poland where petroglyphs have been found near dinosaur footprints, but “nowhere do they show the same level of intentionality,” Troiano said. Intentionality is defined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints, but also by whether they match the prints. The study shows that if they don’t overlap, the producers are being “thoughtful.”
Troiano added that he is working on a follow-up paper that will further deepen the interpretation and analysis of the Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs, based on the findings of the current study.
According to Radosław Palonka, a professor of archeology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who has done similar studies, the direct association of the drawings with dinosaur fossil tracks is unique and may shed further light on the importance, meaning and importance of rock art. petroglyphs, however, were not included in the study.
“The special selection of the locations of the rock art panels is evidenced, among others, by the fact that representatives of communities creating rock paintings or petroglyphs often place them very close to ancient paintings left by other cultures,” Palonka said. he said via email. “This was also true in various parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and is evident, among others, in the North American Southwest/US Southwest, where my scientific interests are concentrated.”
Jan Simek, distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees. “This paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people observed fossils in the field and incorporated them into their religious experiences and interpretations,” said Simek, who was not involved in the new petroglyph study.
“(Stanford University) science historian Adrienne Mayor showed how ancient Greeks and Romans viewed fossils as evidence of giants and monsters from their mythologies, and how indigenous North American peoples saw their own origin narratives in the fossils they observed scattered across their lands. ‘ Simek said via email. “The Brazil case is another archaeological example of this very human tendency to connect the spiritual world created in the imagination to the unexplainable things in the world around us.”
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