Prehistoric people in Brazil carved drawings into rocks next to dinosaur footprints, suggesting they may have found them meaningful or interesting, a new study finds.
The petroglyphs, which archaeologists call petroglyphs, are located at a site called Serrote do Letreiro in Paraíba, an agricultural state at the eastern tip of Brazil. Researchers first observed the tracks in 1975. But they are now interpreted as related to the footprints after recent drone field surveys revealed previously invisible carvings. The tracks belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, which ended 66 million years ago.
"People usually think that the indigenous people were not aware of their environment or did not have any scientific mind or curiosity," said co-author Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. "But that is not true. It is very clear that they were interested in the footprints. We'll never know if they knew anything about dinosaurs, but it's clear they were curious about the prints and thought they were meaningful somehow."
The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs are not the first examples of petroglyphs found close to dinosaur prints, but the study authors said they believe the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular location could have significant implications for the whole of paleontology. archeology and cultural heritage studies.
Geometric shapes
It is unclear how long ago the petroglyphs were created. But the study - published in March in the journal Scientific Reports - notes that radiocarbon dating has shown that burial sites in the area are between 9,400 and 2,620 years old, suggesting that the tribes that left them must have lived during that time.
"These people probably lived in small communities and used natural rock shelters that are very abundant in the area," Troiano said.
"This region in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia: it is very hot and there is no shade, so it is not easy to stand there and cut the rocks. It takes a lot of effort, so when they chose this location they were very intentional," he added. "They could have used so many other rocks in the area, but they chose this one."
The drawings are varied in style, which indicates that several artists had a hand in them. Some have shapes reminiscent of plants, while others resemble geometric shapes, including squares, rectangles and circles. The circles contain crosses or lines, which can resemble stars, Troiano said. However, what these markings mean remains 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 of them for the footprints of rheas: large native birds that resemble ostriches and have tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs.
It's harder to imagine what prehistoric humans would have thought of the sauropod prints, left by some of the largest herbivorous dinosaurs that ever lived, and therefore different from any animal that would have been known to them. Probably for this reason, an intentional connection between the drawings and these specific prints is less clear, the study said.
Dinosaur rituals
Troiano said he believes the marks may have been left during communal gatherings.
"I think the creation of rock art was embedded in some kind of ritual context: people gather and create something, perhaps using psychotropic substances. We have a plant called jurema, which is a hallucinogenic, and it is still used to this day," he said. "We can speculate that people also used 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 I guess they identified them as footprints. They noticed it wasn't random."
There are other locations, Troiano said, with petroglyphs near dinosaur footprints - in the United States and Poland - but these "nowhere show the same level of intentionality," he said. Intentionality is determined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints, but also by whether or not they overlap with them. If they don't overlap, the research suggests the creators have been "attentive."
Troiano added that he is working on a follow-up article that will delve deeper into the interpretation and analysis of the Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs, building on the findings of the current study.
The direct association of the drawings with dinosaur fossils is unique and could shed more light on the importance, meaning and significance of petroglyphs, according to Radosław Palonka, associate professor of archeology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who is working on similar has worked. petroglyphs, but was not involved in the research.
"The fact that the locations of the rock art panels were specifically chosen is evidenced, among other things, by the fact that representatives of the communities that created rock paintings or petroglyphs often placed them very close to older images left by other cultures," says Palonka. said via email. "This was the case in several parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and it is very evident, among other places, in the North American Southwest/Southwest USA, where my scientific interests are concentrated."
Jan Simek, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, agreed. "The paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people observed fossils in the landscape and incorporated them into their religious experiences and interpretations," says Simek, who was also not involved in the new petroglyph research.
"(Stanford University) science historian Adrienne Mayor has shown how ancient Greeks and Romans saw fossils as evidence of giants and monsters from their own mythologies and how indigenous North American peoples saw their origin stories in the fossils they observed scattered across their landscapes, Simek said via email. "The case of Brazil is another archaeological example of this very human tendency to connect the spiritual world created in the imagination with unexplained things in the world around us."
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