{"id":541917,"date":"2025-01-31T11:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T14:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=541917"},"modified":"2025-01-31T11:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T14:22:08","slug":"in-step","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/in-step\/","title":{"rendered":"In step"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Para\u00edba State backland municipality of Sousa, dinosaurs are an attraction; abounding in preserved footprints, the Valley of the Dinosaurs conservation unit is open to visitors and home to a museum of fossils found in the area. Consequently, paleontologists were the group most interested in the region until recently. Now, archaeologists are interested in the Serrote do Letreiro site, which is located 11 kilometers (km) from the town. Here, rock art was made on the ground by people who may have lived there up to 9,000 years ago, associated with the footprints left by animals between 130 million and 145 million years ago. These primitive messages, which have never been seen before 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 noted 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). He added, \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.<\/p>\n

Serrote do Letreiro has an area of 15,000 square meters (m2) in the Para\u00edba sert<\/em>\u00e3<\/em>o<\/em> (badlands) on private property. The site was first recorded in the late 1970s by Italian paleontologist Giuseppe Leonardi, a one-time professor at the Federal University of Paran\u00e1 (UFPR) and the State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG), who is 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 remarked 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 noted the dinosaur specialist, who has been 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. Toward the end of the journey, he ripped his pants on a barbed-wire fence.<\/p>\n

However, the long, eventful trip was 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 the archaeologist remarked enthusiastically. During the visit, the group commissioned drone pilot Arthur Sampaio to produce high-resolution images with the goal of building 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 the identification of three different dinosaur types: theropods, sauropods, and ornithopods. Archaeologists describe the human groups that lived there as semisedentary people who camped, foraged and hunted for what they needed before moving on to the next location.<\/p>\n

Similar markings have been observed in parts of the northeastern Brazilian states Rio Grande do Norte and Cear\u00e1 close to Sousa, indicating that those civilizations inhabited all of the surrounding area. However, the markings found in Serrote do Letreiro are special because they were etched in the ground. \u201cIt\u2019s curious, because normally engravings associated with 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 Ghilardi inferred.<\/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<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>-hist<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>ria do Rio Grande do Norte<\/em> (Prehistoric Rio Grande do Norte), believes that the hypothesis in Scientific Reports<\/em> is worthy of attention. He noted, \u201cIt\u2019s possible that the ancient engravers respected the space of the footprints, because the petroglyphs do not overwrite them\u201d. For the first time, according to Santos J\u00fanior, a study reveals evidence of a site that was inhabited by both dinosaurs and human groups. He emphasized that \u201cThe two groups did not coexist; they are from two different periods,\u201d going on to state that other sites with the same characteristics need to be found to identify a pattern and reinforce the hypothesis that human beings liked to reproduce dinosaur footprints. He noted, \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 said, other reports point to interactions between people and dinosaur prints in Australia, Poland, and the US. In Brazil, the association is unprecedented, although relationships with fossils have occurred frequently over the course of history. Troiano affirmed that, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, 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 were 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 reported the researcher.<\/p>\n

For 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 noted Santos J\u00fanior.<\/p>\n

An understanding of dinosaurs emerged only in the nineteenth century, with the publication of On the Origin of Species<\/em> by the British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809\u20131882) and the popularization of the theory of evolution. \u201cUntil that time, people just didn\u2019t think about large extinct animals,\u201d remarked 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.<\/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":"Thousands of years ago, Indigenous peoples made rock etchings beside dinosaur footprints in Para\u00edba, Brazil","protected":false},"author":721,"featured_media":541918,"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":[],"coauthors":[4241],"class_list":["post-541917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541917","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=541917"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541931,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541917\/revisions\/541931"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541917"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=541917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}