Brazilian researchers have made a remarkable discovery spanning thousands of years: dinosaur footprints and rock art dating back more than 9,000 years. The collection was discovered in Cerrote do Retreiro, in Brazil’s Sousa Basin, and a related study was published in the Brazilian Journal of Science. Scientific Reports journal.
The study suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Brazil created numerous cryptic rock paintings, or petroglyphs, next to the dinosaur footprints. These discoveries provide fascinating insights into the intersection of paleontology and archaeology revealed by this impressive assemblage at the Cerroté outcrop.
According to the paper, researchers first identified the petroglyphs in 1975, but it was only recently that these carvings were discovered in close proximity to the giant dinosaur footprints. The discovery was facilitated by the innovative use of a drone. The footprints belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, which ended about 66 million years ago, according to the researchers.
The researchers noted that some of the petroglyphs are only 2 to 4 inches away from the dinosaur footprints and may even depict the footprints themselves, leading them to believe that ancient humans intentionally placed these carvings next to dinosaur footprints.
This suggests that people at that time not only knew about dinosaurs, but had a deep interest in them. “The people who drew the petroglyphs were very conscious of the footprints and probably chose those locations precisely because of the footprints,” said Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage and lead author of the study. Live Science “It would have been impossible to miss their presence.”
Troiano said ancient people were very intrigued by the footprints and assumed they had some kind of meaning, which is linked to Cerrote’s location: Cerrote do Retreiro, which means “signpost hill” in Portuguese, is close to the Valley of the Dinosaurs, a protected area known for hundreds of dinosaur footprints.
Troiano and his colleagues conducted the study with a group of middle school students who explored the site in 2023. The students learned about the intersection of paleontology and archaeology, and also helped photograph the specimens. The team noted that the footprints belonged to a variety of dinosaur types, including carnivorous theropods, long-necked sauropods, and bipedal ornithopods, including iguanodontids.
The rock carvings found were mainly carvings of circles filled with lines and other geometric strokes. These artworks are attributed to humans who lived in the area between 9,400 and 2,620 years ago. “They were a small, semi-nomadic group of hunter-gatherers who lived in social settings and used objects made of stone,” Troiano said. The team said these ancient humans created these rock carvings using two techniques: drilling and scraping.
“Perforation is the process of using something like a stone hammer to create depressions in the surface, similar to pointillism, while scraping is the process of rubbing a stone against the surface to form the desired sculpture,” Troiano explained.
Petroglyphs provide important evidence about historical figures and shed light on rituals and practices of the time. “I think the creation of the rock art was rooted in some kind of ritual context, where people came together to make something and maybe use psychoactive substances,” Troiano said, adding that these people were interested “in what the footprints represent.”
Jean Simek, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, who supports Troiano’s hypothesis, said: CNN“This paper provides a fascinating new example of how ancient people observed fossils in the landscape and incorporated them into their religious experiences and interpretations.”
He said the case was another archaeological example of “the human tendency to connect a spiritual world created in our imagination with unexplained things in the world around us.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on May 4, 2024. It has since been updated.
