Rock carvings that are no longer anywhere in the world: hand cave in Argentina

In the south of Argentina, in the Rio Pinturas river valley, there is one of the most stunning caves in the world with unusual cave paintings. If the inhabitants of Eurasia and Africa preferred to draw wild animals, everyday scenes and moments of hunting, then the ancient inhabitants of South America left their handprints to posterity.

This is the Cave of Hands, or Cueva de las Manos, as this place is officially called in the Argentinean province of Santa Cruz. This is not one cave, but a whole complex of grottoes, halls and corridors, whose length is about 160 kilometers. Of course, not all are available for visiting, but only the most interesting and relatively safe for unprepared travelers. The nearest city, from which cave tours are mainly organized, is Baho Caracoles.

The central motif in many wall paintings is the prints of human hands. To be more precise, these are not prints, but a repetition of the contour, which was achieved by applying a coloring substance on top of a hand applied to the wall. Archaeologists have discovered in the cave several tubes made of hollow bones, with the help of which primitive artists made their drawings. They obtained paint for them by grinding various colored natural minerals. Interestingly, the vast majority of the drawings depict the left hand, and, as the researchers believe, these are the hands of young men who left their fingerprints during some kind of ritual.

But the caves on the banks of Rio Pinturas are interesting not only for the images of their hands. Here you can see the moments of hunting for large birds of Nanda and Guanaco, as well as drawings of other representatives of the South American fauna.

Patagonia is a rather severe natural region, where a strong, cold wind constantly blows, and the animal and plant world is not very diverse. This region was equally inhospitable about 15 thousand years ago, when immigrants from the north came to these lands. Various research methods give a scatter in the age of the earliest images from 9.5 to 13 thousand years. And the latest drawings, according to scientists, were painted on the walls of the Cueva de las Manos about 2,000 years ago. That is, people lived here for a rather long time, and the caves themselves were used not only as dwellings, but also for ritual purposes. The inhabitants of the caves, most likely, were the ancestors of the Teuelche Indians, who today live in the south of Patagonia.

Today, this wonderful cave, on the walls of which are traces of the hands of the most ancient people of the American continent, is often visited by travelers, and many organizers of routes in Patagonia include it in their tours.