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Related article<\/span> Record-breaking dinosaur footprint appears on the Yorkshire coast<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPeople usually think that Indigenous people weren\u2019t aware of their surroundings or didn\u2019t have any kind of scientific spirit or curiosity,\u201d said study coauthor Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. \u201cBut that\u2019s not true. It\u2019s very clear that they were interested in the footprints. We\u2019ll never know if they knew about dinosaurs, but it is clear that they were curious about the prints and thought they were meaningful in some way.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs aren\u2019t the first examples of rock art found close to dinosaur prints, but the authors of the study said they believe that the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular site could have significant implications across paleontology, archaeology and cultural heritage studies. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear how long ago the petroglyphs were made. But the study \u2014 published in March in the journal Scientific Reports \u2014 notes that radiocarbon dating has found burial sites in the area to be between 9,400 and 2,620 years old, suggesting the tribes that left them must have lived during that time. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese people were probably living in small communities, using natural rocky shelters that are very abundant in the area,\u201d Troiano said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis region in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia \u2014 it\u2019s really hot and there\u2019s no shade, so it\u2019s not easy to stand there and carve the rock. It requires a lot of effort, so when they picked this location, they were being very intentional,\u201d he added. \u201cThey could have used so many other rock outcrops in the surroundings, but they chose this one.\u201d <\/p>\n
The drawings are varied in style, suggesting multiple artists might have had a hand in them. Some have shapes reminiscent of plants, while others resemble geometric forms, including squares, rectangles and circles. The circles have crosses or lines inside them, which might look like stars, Troiano said. However, what these markings mean remains a mystery. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey all seem to be abstract, and if they represented something to the people who made them, we don\u2019t know what it is,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Ancient face carvings exposed as Amazon water level drops to record lows<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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 might have mistaken some of them for the footprints of rheas \u2014 large native birds similar to ostriches, which have tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s harder to imagine what the prehistoric people could have thought of the sauropod prints, left by some of the largest herbivore dinosaurs that ever lived, and therefore unlike any animal that would have been familiar to them. Probably for this reason, an intentional association between the drawings and these particular prints is less clear, the study noted. <\/p>\n
Troiano said he believes that the marks might have been left during communal gatherings. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think rock art creation was embedded in some sort of ritual context: people gathering and creating something, perhaps utilizing some psychotropics. We have a plant called jurema, which is hallucinogenic, and it\u2019s still used to this day,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can speculate that people were using it in the past as well because it\u2019s so abundant and common in the region. I think they were interested in what the footprints represent, and I suppose they identified them as footprints. They noticed it wasn\u2019t random.\u201d <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100,000 years before humans<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are other sites, Troiano said, with petroglyphs in the vicinity of dinosaur footprints \u2014 in the United States and Poland \u2014 but they are displaying \u201cnowhere near the same level of intentionality,\u201d he said. Intentionality is defined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints but also whether or not they overlap with them. If they don\u2019t overlap, it suggests \u201cthoughtfulness\u201d by the makers, the study suggests. <\/p>\n
Troiano added that he\u2019s working on a follow-up paper that will go deeper into the interpretation and the analysis of the Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs, building upon the findings of the current study. <\/p>\n
The direct association of the drawings with dinosaur fossil tracks is unique and may shed more light on rock art importance, meaning and significance, according to Rados\u0142aw Palonka, an associate professor of archaeology at the Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, Poland, who has worked on similar petroglyphs but was not involved in the study. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that the locations of the rock art panels have been chosen specifically is shown by, among others, 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,\u201d Palonka said via email. \u201cThis was the case in various parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and it is very clearly visible, among others, in the North American Southwest\/U.S. Southwest, where my scientific interests are focusing.\u201d <\/p>\n
Jan Simek, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, agreed. \u201cThe paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people observed and incorporated fossils on the landscape into their religious experiences and interpretations,\u201d said Simek, who also was not involved with the new petroglyphs study. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe (Stanford University) historian of science 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 narratives in the fossils they observed scattered across their landscapes,\u2019 Simek said via email. \u201cThe Brazil case is another archaeological example of this very human tendency to tie the spiritual world created in the imagination to unexplained things in the world around us.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prehistoric humans in Brazil carved drawings in the rock next to dinosaur footprints, suggesting that they may have found them meaningful or interesting, a new study has found. The rock carvings, which archaeologists call petroglyphs, are at a site called Serrote do Letreiro in Para\u00edba, an agricultural state on the eastern tip of Brazil. Researchers <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":17856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}