{"id":530877,"date":"2024-09-11T09:47:06","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T12:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=530877"},"modified":"2024-09-13T19:22:29","modified_gmt":"2024-09-13T22:22:29","slug":"original-people-made-engravings-alongside-dinosaur-footprints-in-paraiba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/original-people-made-engravings-alongside-dinosaur-footprints-in-paraiba\/","title":{"rendered":"Indigenous peoples made engravings alongside dinosaur footprints"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Para\u00edba State backland municipality of Sousa, dinosaurs are something of an attraction; abounding in preserved footprints, the Valley of the Dinosaurs conservation unit is open to visitation, and also home to a museum of fossils found in the area. Consequently, paleontologists were the most interested in the region until recently. The attraction now is for archaeologists: at the Serrote do Letreiro site, 11 kilometers (km) from the town, there is also rock art on the ground made by people who may have lived there up to 9,000 years ago, associated to the footprints left by animals between 130 million and 145 million years ago. These primitive messages, never before seen in Brazil, suggest that the parallels were intentional, according to an article published in the journal Scientific Reports <\/em><\/a>in March.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis site is a real overdose of information,\u201d says paleontologist Tito Aureliano, one of the study authors, a postdoctoral researcher at the Regional University of Cariri (URCA), and one of the coordinators of the Diversity, Ichnology, and Osteohistology Laboratory (DINOLAB) at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). \u201cThere is a considerable temporal mix there: rocks almost 1 billion years old, then you walk 50 steps and see traces of the Cretaceous Period (about 130 million years ago); there are dozens of different dinosaur footprints and human engravings made some thousands of years ago,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Serrote do Letreiro is an area of 15,000 square meters (m2<\/sup>) in the Para\u00edba sert\u00e3o<\/em> (badlands) on a private property. The site was first recorded in the late 1970s by Italian paleontologist Giuseppe Leonardi, one-time professor at the Federal University of Paran\u00e1 (UFPR) and the State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG), now retired. At the time, he classified the markings \u2014 or petroglyphs \u2014 as \u201cCariri Indigenous carvings,\u201d and focused his interest exclusively on the dinosaur prints. \u201cThese human engravings attracted no attention,\u201d remarks paleontologist Aline Ghilardi, of UFRN, also coordinator of Dinolab and coauthor of the recent study.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Renan Chandu<\/span>The researchers examined the markings and mapped the site by drone during an expedition to Serrote do LetreiroRenan Chandu<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt has always intrigued me that there were never any answers about what those human markings were, so I decided to recruit some help,\u201d says the dinosaur specialist, a regular visitor to Serrote do Letreiro for almost a decade; in 2023 she invited archaeologist Leonardo Troiano, of the Brazilian National Institute for Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), to visit the site. Troiano flew from S\u00e3o Paulo to Juazeiro do Norte, Cear\u00e1 State, and then took a 190-km bus ride to Sousa, with a further leg on a hard dirt road to the site. Towards the end of the journey, he ripped his pants on a barbed-wire fence.<\/p>\n

The long, eventful trip was, however, rewarded. \u201cAt day\u2019s end, before a magnificent sunset, the shadows of the last 15 minutes of waning sunlight bring out the footprints and engravings; it\u2019s amazing,\u201d enthuses the archaeologist. During the visit, the group commissioned drone pilot Arthur Sampaio to produce high-resolution images<\/a> \u2014 the intention of the article researchers is to build a 3D digital model of the site. The etchings take the form of tridigits, grids, and circles with patterns of crossed lines, like stars.<\/p>\n

According to the researchers\u2019 interpretations, some of the inscriptions imitate three-toed feet. The petrified footprints enabled identification of three different dinosaur types: theropods, sauropods, and ornithopods. Archaeologists describe the human groups that lived there as semisedentary peoples who camped, foraging and hunting for what they needed before moving on to the next location.<\/p>\n

Similar markings have been seen in parts of northeastern Brazilian states Rio Grande do Norte and Cear\u00e1 close to Sousa, indicating that those civilizations inhabited all of the surrounding area. What sets the markings found in Serrote do Letreiro apart from the others is that the etchings there were made in the ground. \u201cIt\u2019s curious, because normally engravings associated to that culture are found on vertical or inclined rock panels, so there is strong evidence that this ancient population made their rock art there because of the footprints; there is a direct association between the markings,\u201d infers Ghilardi.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n <\/picture>Leonardo Troiano\u2009\/\u2009Iphan | Alexandre Affonso\u2009\/\u2009Revista Pesquisa FAPESP<\/span>\n

Archaeologist Valdeci dos Santos J\u00fanior, from Archaeology Laboratory O Homem Potiguar<\/em> (The Potiguar Man\u2014pertinent to the region of Rio Grande do Norte State) (LAHP), of Rio Grande do Norte State University (UERN), who did not participate in the study but authored the book A pr\u00e9-hist\u00f3ria do Rio Grande do Norte <\/em>(Prehistoric Rio Grande do Norte), believes that the hypothesis in Scientific Reports<\/em> is worthy of attention. \u201cIt\u2019s possible that the ancient engravers respected the space of the footprints, because the petroglyphs do not overwrite them,\u201d he says. For the first time, says Santos J\u00fanior, a study reveals evidence of a site that was inhabited both by dinosaurs and human groups. \u201cThe two groups did not coexist; they are from two different periods,\u201d he stresses, going on to state that there is a need to find other sites with the same characteristics to identify a pattern and reinforce the hypothesis that human beings liked to reproduce dinosaur footprints. \u201cIt is not so simple a question\u2014tridigits are common engravings in the Northeast, and can represent birds, other animals\u2019 footprints, or even plants such as cacti, a common part of the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

That having been said, other reports point to interactions between people and dinosaur prints in Australia, Poland, and the US. In Brazil, the association is unprecedented, although the relationship with fossils has been frequent over the course of history. In southern state Rio Grande do Sul, Troiano affirms, some constructions, such as older churches, were built using fossil timber, which looks different from common wood. Legends and stories from Ancient Greece were inspired by the discovery of fossils, according to the archaeologist. The bones of mammoths and other giant animals would be portrayed as heroes in these stories. \u201cThe site in Pelopponessus, where they believed the Gods and Titans to have clashed, is a fossil deposit,\u201d reports the researcher.<\/p>\n

For the specialists, finding human records beside footprints suggests that ancient Brazilian communities also valued discoveries of the past. \u201cThese peoples inhabited the Americas for 50,000 years in deep harmony with the natural world, and such discoveries most certainly had a special value for them; it was not something trivial,\u201d says Santos J\u00fanior.<\/p>\n

Understanding of dinosaurs only emerged in the nineteenth century, with the publication of On the Origin of Species<\/em> by British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809\u20131882), and popularization of the theory of evolution. \u201cUntil that time, people just didn\u2019t think about large extinct animals,\u201d says Santos J\u00fanior. These symbolic records are the vestiges of groups that predated the arrival of the colonizers in Brazil. Other research should seek out more signs to sustain this possible connection between dinosaur footprints and petroglyphs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientific article<\/strong>
\nTROIANO, L. P. et al.<\/em> A remarkable assemblage of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints in Northeast Brazil<\/a>. Scientific Reports<\/strong>. Online. mar. 19, 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Indigenous peoples carved marks next to dinosaur footprints in Para\u00edba","protected":false},"author":721,"featured_media":530878,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[202,255],"coauthors":[4241],"class_list":["post-530877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-archaeology","tag-paleontology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/721"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530877"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531887,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530877\/revisions\/531887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530877"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=530877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}