Mysterious rock carvings found next to dinosaur tracks in Brazil suggest ancient people discovered the footprints thousands of years ago and recognised them as meaningful.
The Serrote do Letreiro site in Para铆ba state features the footprints of theropod, sauropod and ornithopod dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous Epoch, between 145 million and 100 million years ago. Adjacent to these are numerous rock carvings, or petroglyphs, predominantly circular with radial lines and other abstract motifs.
at Brazil鈥檚 National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage and his colleagues surveyed the site three times on foot and used drones for an aerial survey. They discovered new dinosaur footprints and more than 30 petroglyphs surrounding them.
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Little is known about the makers of these petroglyphs. 鈥淭hey were nomadic or semi-sedentary groups that lived in north-eastern Brazil,鈥� says Troiano. 鈥淭hey used stone tools and survived by hunting and gathering available natural resources. Considering the dates obtained from the few dated sites in the region, we speculate that the petroglyphs were made between 3000 and 9000 years ago.鈥�
Troiano says there is a special relationship between the petroglyphs and the footprints, but we cannot know how these people interpreted them. 鈥淒etermining the motives behind these depictions is a truly complex thing,鈥� he says. However, he says the prehistoric artists may have thought they were giant bird tracks.
at the University of Arizona points out that Indigenous oral traditions offer a rich window into how people interpreted their world, including extinct creatures. 鈥淔or example, some scholars have pointed out the impressive Thunderbird of traditional narratives 鈥� that are depicted in rock images across North America 鈥� may well be representations of Teratornis, a genus of massive birds of prey that went extinct by the late Pleistocene [about 12,000 years ago],鈥� he says.
Scientific Reports
