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The study of rock art, especially cave paintings, used to be strongly focused on Europe. But in recent years, it has expanded after major discoveries in Indonesia and mainland Asia. One of the latest additions to the scientific record comes in the form of giant snakes found in South America.
Along the Orinoco river in Colombia and Venezuela, researchers have found 157 rock art sites. They include engravings of snakes, some of which stretch for more than 40 metres. Images at this scale stop being simple depictions and become monumental: they are visible from hundreds of metres away and alter the entire landscape.
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While the art hasn’t been directly dated, ceramics from the region that carry similar, smaller engravings have. They are about 2000 years old, so for want of anything better, it seems reasonable to guess that the huge snake engravings are around the same age.
In her story about the engravings, Chen Ly links them to the mythology of the Indigenous Orinoco people, which portrays anacondas and boa constrictors as “primordial creators”. It may be that the snake engravings are religious in nature, representing beliefs about creation and supernatural power.
We could get deep into the symbology of the images, but for the rest of this newsletter I want to take a step back. The sheer number and scale of the rock art sites along the Orinoco is impressive. What’s equally striking is how little we know about this rock art tradition.
It’s not that rock art from the area was unknown to science. Once I started looking, I easily found a paper entitled “Discovery of Some New Petroglyphs near Caicara on the Orinoco” that was published in 1912, and studies have come out steadily since at least the 1970s. The new study also acknowledges “the expertise of local guides”, so I don’t think the sites are exactly secret. And yet, they were news to me – and, I suspect, to most.
Which gets me to my overall point: we have underestimated just how widespread rock art is. I’m not trying to downplay the incredible cave art found in European caves like Lascaux and Chauvet. But I want to emphasise that rock art is a truly global phenomenon.
Artistic apes
One of the defining features of humans is that we like to spend time expressing ourselves creatively. A lot of prehistoric art has been lost, especially music and dance, but visual art is preserved fairly often. The archaeological record of visual art spans tens of thousands of years. It also seems to extend beyond our species: there is growing evidence that other hominins, especially Neanderthals, also made art.
Nowadays, we often talk about art in a chin-stroking way. What does it mean, what did the artist intend, does it achieve the desired level of symmetry or visual flow? This can all get very esoteric, and I think it sometimes distracts us from how instinctive and intuitive art can be. Some prehistoric art presumably had deep religious or cultural significance. Some of it may have been idle doodling.
Nevertheless, we can see some patterns. A lot of cave paintings depict hunting scenes. Animals are often drawn more realistically than humans. For some reason, Stone Age Europeans from the last 30,000 years were terribly keen on drawing horses.
In 2021, Alison George wrote a story about how the study of rock art was changing. Having previously been strongly focused on Europe, where cave paintings like those of Lascaux and Altamira have fascinated people for decades, researchers were expanding their horizons. Major discoveries in Indonesia and mainland Asia suggested cave art was more widespread in prehistory than previously thought. This also implied the practice hadn’t been invented by early Europeans, but might instead go back to the earliest Homo sapiens in Africa.
Three years on, I think it’s reasonable to suggest prehistoric rock art is even more widespread than that. We are finding it on every continent that ancient humans inhabited. (Antarctica is devoid of rock art for obvious reasons.)
Rock art in the Americas
Returning to South America, in 2020 researchers described a vast collection of images spanning 5 kilometres of rock face from SerranĂa La Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon. Alongside familiar fish, birds and lizards, the art includes images of extinct species like long-necked camelids and what could be giant sloths and mastodons. It seems to be 12,500 years old, suggesting it was painted by some of the Amazon’s earliest inhabitants.
In Piauà in north-east Brazil, Serra da Capivara National Park has a great many prehistoric paintings. Archaeologists led by Niède Guidon have documented the rock art and presented evidence that some of it is 32,000 years old. This points to humans arriving in the Americas earlier than generally thought, so has been controversial.
Further south, in February researchers described the oldest dated rock art in Patagonia, Argentina. At Cueva Huenul 1, people painted for more than 3000 years, beginning 8200 years ago. Most of the images are elemental geometric shapes like circles and lines, but there are also more complex designs like polygons and cruciforms. A small number of the images represent people – human silhouettes and a face – and animals such as guanacos, a wild South American camelid. The site is far from unique: a 2019 review described 33 rock art sites in Patagonia.
Meanwhile, in North America there is a cave in California that has a red drawing of a wheel or spiral on its ceiling. Accordingly, it’s called Pinwheel cave. In 2020, researchers described the chewed remains of a plant called sacred datura (Datura wrightii) from the cave. The plant is a hallucinogen, and it may be that the drawing is of sacred datura. The implication is that Indigenous Americans used the plant to have hallucinogenic visions and painted a representation of it on the cave ceiling to venerate its powers.
The Pinwheel cave drawing is probably just 400 years old, but other North American rock art is far older. The petroglyphs around Winnemucca Lake in Nevada are between 10,500 and 14,800 years old. Other sites in the Great Basin appear to be of a comparable age.
Under-explored Eurasia and Africa
Even in Europe and Asia, there are many areas that have been under-explored for rock art, and where it turns out there is plenty to be found.
The Arabian peninsula has been a rich source of finds. In 2021 I wrote a feature about the prehistory of Arabia, which included a short box describing some of the rock art from the region. Where dating has been possible, it’s all from the last 10,000 years. As in many other places, a lot of the imagery is of animals, with the older pictures showing the hunting of wild animals and more recent ones depicting herding.
Likewise, in April we learned that humans in Arabia sometimes lived in lava tubes: underground tunnels produced by lava flows from volcanoes. Some of the lava tubes had drawings on their walls showing domestic sheep and goats.
We have heard less about rock art in Central Asia, in part because of all the long-standing political tensions around Russia. But it is there. Nomadic peoples in east Siberia painted on rocks more than 2000 years ago.
In the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, rocky outcrops are often decorated with petroglyphs. Some of them seem to be as much as 5000 years old. A few days ago, I read about a group of volunteers on an environmental cleanup who found 100 petroglyphs in the south-east of the country. The glyphs depict animals like wild sheep and double-humped camels, as well as people hunting. When archaeologists were contacted, they revealed they already knew about the site. They had not yet described it in a scientific journal, and in the meantime they were keeping it secret to prevent damage from tourists or vandals.
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Elsewhere, a 2020 study described petroglyphs from Teymareh in central Iran. One shows a six-legged animal with streaks along its body, which the archaeologists interpreted as a jewel beetle. The same site also has petroglyphs depicting falconry from perhaps 4000 years ago.
Finally, Australia has an incredible tradition of rock art. Murujuga in Western Australia has more than 2 million engravings, which have been carved over the past 50,000 years. Alice Klein visited in 2022. She wrote: “There is art all over the rocks – images of people dancing, boomerangs, boats, wallabies, emus and extinct species like fat-tailed kangaroos and thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers. The newer art captures whales, fish, crabs and turtles that arrived when rising sea levels turned the once-inland region into a coastal area.”
In contrast, Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory has over 80 sites with Maliwawa Figures. They are probably between 6000 and 9400 years old. They are large images depicting humans and animals, sometimes solitary and sometimes in compositions or scenes.
You know where rock art is still severely under-studied? Africa: the place we all ultimately come from.
Not that Africa lacks rock art. From Leopard cave in Namibia to the Phuthiatsana valley in Lesotho, and from the coast of South Africa to the caves of Madagascar, rock art is common.Ěý Archaeologists have noted a tendency for East African art to be quite abstract, unlike the traditions in other parts of the continent, which are more representational. For instance, Mfangano Island in Kenya has paintings of concentric circles, spirals and oblongs.
Instead, the issue is one of access to modern scientific methods. A study from 2021 noted that the analytical techniques used to study the chemical composition and age of rock art “are still at an embryonic stage” in Africa. This relates to longstanding issues around poverty, under-funding of scientific research and limited training opportunities for researchers in Africa.
The more we investigate the rock art of Africa, the more I expect we’ll find – and the older some of it will turn out to be. I would lay odds that the oldest rock art in the world is to be found there. I mean, where else would it be?
