Brazilian researchers have made a surprising discovery that connects several millennia: dinosaur footprints and cave paintings that are more than 9,000 years old. The collection was discovered in Serrote do Letreiro, in the Sousa Basin, and the corresponding research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Brazil made numerous enigmatic cave drawings, or petroglyphs, alongside dinosaur footprints. These discoveries offer a fascinating glimpse into the blending of paleontology and archaeology, as revealed in this impressive assemblage from the Serrote outcrops.
Image source: Scientific Reports
Image source: Scientific Reports
The study notes that while researchers first identified the petroglyphs in 1975, they only recently discovered the carvings near massive dinosaur footprints. The discovery was aided by the innovative use of drones. The tracks, they said, belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, which ended about 66 million years ago.
Researchers believe ancient humans deliberately placed these carvings next to dinosaur footprints, noting that some petroglyphs are only 2 to 4 inches apart and may represent the footprints themselves.
Image source: Scientific Reports
Image source: Scientific Reports
This suggests that people of that time were not only aware of the existence of dinosaurs, but also deeply curious about them. “The individuals who made the petroglyphs were particularly attentive to the footprints, and probably chose their locations precisely because of them,” Leonardo Troiano, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage, told Live Science. “It would have been impossible to miss their presence.”
Troiano said these ancient humans were very interested in the footprints and considered them significant in some way. This also goes hand in hand with Serrote’s location. Serrote do Letreiro, which means “signpost hill” in Portuguese, is close to the Valley of the Dinosaurs, a conservation area known for its hundreds of fossilized dinosaur footprints.
Image source: Scientific Reports
Image source: Scientific Reports
Troiano and his fellow researchers conducted the research with a group of middle school students who studied the site in 2023. In addition to learning about the convergence of paleontology and archaeology, the students helped photograph the specimens. The team noted that the tracks belong to a variety of dinosaur types, such as carnivorous theropods, long-necked sauropods, and bipedal ornithopods, including iguanodont dinosaurs.
The petroglyphs discovered were mostly engravings of circles filled with lines and other geometric features. These works of art are attributed to humans who lived in the region between 9,400 and 2,620 years ago. “These were small, semi-nomadic groups of hunters and gatherers who lived in societies and used objects made from stones,” Troiano said. These ancient humans made these rock engravings using two techniques: perforation and scraping, the team explained.
“Perforating involves using a kind of stone hammer to create depressions on the surface, resembling dotted lines, while scraping involves rubbing a stone against the surface until it forms the desired engraving,” Troiano explains.
The petroglyphs provide crucial evidence about the historical population and shed light on the rituals and practices of that time. “I think the creation of rock art was part of some kind of ritual context: people would come together and create something, maybe using psychoactive drugs,” Troiano said, adding that people were interested in “what the footprints represent.”
Jan Simek, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, confirmed Troiano’s hypothesis, telling CNN: “The study provides an interesting new example of how ancient peoples observed and incorporated landscape fossils into their religious experiences and interpretations.”
He said the case is another archaeological example of “the human tendency to link the spiritual world created in the imagination to unexplained things in the world around us.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 4, 2024. It has since been updated.
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