Detail of Stone Age depictions of human and animal footprints in the Doro Nawas Mountains, Namibia. – ANDREAS PASTOORS, CC-BY 4.0
MADRID, 14 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
During the Stone Age, in what is now Namibia, rock artists carved human and animal footprints in such detail that You can still know which animals they represent, their age and sex.
Engravings of animal tracks and human footprints appear in numerous prehistoric rock art traditions around the world. Namibia is especially rich in Late Stone Age hunter-gatherer rock artwith many well-executed engravings of animal and human footprints.
However, most of the research on prehistoric rock art has grouped these engravings with geometric shapes, so they are very little studied despite being common throughout the world.
In a new study published in PLOS ONEAndreas Pastoors of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and colleagues enlisted the help of indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari Desert to analyze animal and human footprints in rock art of the Doro Nawas mountains, in central western Namibia.
The experts were able to define the species, sex, age group and even the exact animal leg or human footprint. in more than 90% of the 513 engravings they analyzed. Their work demonstrated that rock art presented much more diversity in the animals represented by footprints than in the engravings of the animals themselves.
The engravers also showed a clear preference for certain species and were more likely to depict adult animals than young ones, and footprints of males rather than females.
The new findings reveal patterns that likely arise from culturally determined preferences, but the meaning of these patterns is still unknown. The researchers propose that consultation with current indigenous experts might shed some light on this field.
They point out that although indigenous knowledge has enormous capacity to advance archaeological research, in this situation the precise meaning and context of rock art is likely to remain elusive.
“The rock walls of Namibia contain numerous representations of animals and humans from the Stone Age, as well as human footprints and animal tracks,” they continue. because researchers lacked the knowledge necessary to interpret them.
Archaeologists from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the University of Cologne (Germany), together with indigenous trackers from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Tsumkwe (Namibia), They have now examined several hundred footprints in more detail and have discovered surprising details.
“The footprints cover a broader range of animal species than in conventional representations of animals and differentiated cultural patterns emerge in the representation of different species,” they conclude.
2023-09-14 12:08:32
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