Earliest directly dated rock art from Patagonia reveals socio-ecological resilience to mid-Holocene climate

Abstract

The timing for the evolution of the capacity to inscribe the landscape with rock art is globally significant. While this was an in-built capacity when Homo sapiens first colonized the Americas, the heterogeneous distribution of rock art shows that it was a facultative behavior arising under unknown socio-ecological conditions. Patagonia was the last region to be explored by humans. While its rock art is globally important, it remains largely undated by absolute methods. We report the earliest set of directly radiocarbon dated rock art motifs from the archaeological site Cueva Huenul 1 (northwestern Patagonia, Argentina), starting at 8.2 ka BP, predating previous records by several millennia, and encompassing over 3 ka (~130 human generations). This mid-Holocene ‘rock art emergence’ phase overlaps with extremely arid conditions and a human demographic stasis. We suggest that this diachronic rock art emerged as part of a resilient response to ecological stress by highly mobile and low-density populations.