Earliest directly dated rock art from Patagonia reveals socioecological resilience to mid-Holocene climate
Earliest directly dated rock art from Patagonia reveals socioecological resilience to mid-Holocene climate
Authors
Villanueva, Guadalupe Romero
Sepulveda, Marcela
Carcamo Vega, Jose
Cherkinsky, Alexander
de Porras, Maria Eugenia
Barberena, Ramiro
Sepulveda, Marcela
Carcamo Vega, Jose
Cherkinsky, Alexander
de Porras, Maria Eugenia
Barberena, Ramiro
Profesor GuĆa
Authors
Date
Datos de publicaciĆ³n:
10.1126/sciadv.adk4415
SCIENCE ADVANCES,Vol.10,2024
SCIENCE ADVANCES,Vol.10,2024
Tipo de recurso
Article
Keywords
Materia geogrƔfica
Collections
Abstract
The timing for the evolution of the capacity to inscribe the landscape with rock art has global relevance. While this was an in-built capacity when Homo sapiens first colonized the Americas, the heterogeneous distribution of rock art shows that it was a facultative behavior arising under unknown socioecological conditions. Patagonia was the last region to be explored by humans. While its rock art is globally important, it remains largely undated by absolute methods. We report the earliest set of directly radiocarbon-dated rock art motifs from the archaeological site Cueva Huenul 1 (northwestern Patagonia, Argentina), starting at 8.2 thousand years before the present (ka B.P.), predating previous records by several millennia, and encompassing over 3 ka (similar to 130 human generations). This mid-Holocene 'rock art emergence' phase overlaps with extremely arid conditions and a human demographic stasis. We suggest that this diachronic rock art emerged as part of a resilient response to ecological stress by highly mobile and low-density populations.