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The 895 paintings were found by Argentine and Chilean
archaeologists in the Huenul 1 cave, a 630 square meter rock
shelter located in the province of Neuquen, some 1,100
kilometers (684 miles) southwest of the capital Buenos Aires.
"We were able to date four black peniform patterns that were
drawn in charcoal. These proved to be the earliest direct dating
of cave paintings in South America," said Dr. Guadalupe Romero
Villanueva, author of the research published in the Science
Advances journal.
The Argentinean archaeologist said the discovery indicates that
the production of cave art began in the Huenul cave about 8,000
years ago and that the practice of painting the particular
pattern seen in the cave was sustained for a period of at least
3,000 years.
The discovery provides evidence of the artistic ability and
cultural transmission of the hunter-gatherer societies which
inhabited the region during the middle Holocene, a period
roughly from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, and reveals the
socioecological resilience to climate, as well as serving as a
means of communication between scattered populations.
"We believe these images in particular were part of a resilient
response of the mobile hunter-gatherer groups that occupied this
cave and the desert environments of northern Patagonia to the
climatic challenge of a period of extreme dryness that occurred
during the middle Holocene," said Romero Villanueva, a
researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical
Research of Argentina.
Villanueva said there are other places in South America that
could have older cave paintings, but which only have relative
dating, like Argentina's Cueva de las Manos, with cave paintings
dating back 9,500 years.
(Reporting by Miguel Lo Bianco; Writing by Steven Grattan;
Editing by Stephen Coates)
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