Large engraving of an elephant at rock art site RAS 8.
Hunter-gatherer people were carving human and other animal tracks in rocks in Namibia during the Later Stone Age (LSA) that began in Southern Africa about 20,000 years ago.
Unlike the Paluxy hoax in America, when crudely forged human tracks were carved by local people on top of dinosaur tracks, to provide souvenirs for gullible tourists during the Great Depression, these carvings are believed to have had cultural significance for the people who carved them.
They depict detailed human footprints interspersed with tracks of hooved animals which are so accurate that experts are able to determine detailed information on the species, age, sex, limbs, side of the body, trackway and relative direction of the tracks.
The carvings are on six rockfaces in the Doro !nawas mountains in Namibia.
What information do you have about the rock carvings in the Doro !nawas mountains in the Namib Desert in northwest Central Namibia? The Doro !Nawas Mountains, located in the northwest part of the Namib Desert in central Namibia, are known for their rock engravings and petroglyphs, which provide valuable insights into the history and culture of the indigenous people who inhabited the region. These engravings are primarily attributed to the San people, also known as the Bushmen, and possibly other indigenous groups who lived in the area. Here is some information about the rock carvings in the Doro !Nawas Mountains:In this new study, Dr. Andreas Pastoors from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and colleagues from The University of Cologne enlisted the help of Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari desert to analyze animal and human footprints in rock art in the Doro !nawas Mountains in central Western Namibia.It's important to note that my information is based on knowledge available up to September 2021, and there may have been developments or new discoveries in the field of archaeology and rock art research since that time. If you plan to visit or research the rock carvings in the Doro !Nawas Mountains, I recommend contacting local authorities, archaeological experts, or tour operators for the most up-to-date information and guidance.
- Age and Origin: The rock carvings in the Doro !Nawas Mountains are believed to date back thousands of years, possibly to the Later Stone Age or even earlier. These engravings are considered to be some of the oldest rock art in Namibia.
- Subject Matter: The carvings depict various scenes and symbols, including animals such as giraffes, ostriches, and other wildlife, as well as human figures, geometric patterns, and abstract designs. Some of the engravings may also have shamanic or spiritual significance.
- Cultural Significance: The rock art provides important cultural and historical insights into the indigenous people of the region, their way of life, and their interactions with the environment. It is a valuable record of the beliefs, practices, and daily life of these ancient communities.
- Preservation: Efforts have been made to protect and preserve these rock engravings, as they are vulnerable to erosion, weathering, and vandalism. Many of them are in remote or difficult-to-reach locations.
- Tourism and Research: The Doro !Nawas Mountains and the surrounding areas have become a popular destination for tourists and researchers interested in the rock art of Namibia. Guided tours and visits to these sites are available for those interested in exploring and learning about the history and significance of the engravings.
The experts were able to define the species, sex, age group and even the exact leg of the animal or human print in more than 90% of the 513 engravings they analyzed.
Humans are probably the only species capable of 'reading' the information in animal tracks - a skill which would have been invaluable to hunter-gatherer people. With practice, we can look at animal tracks and tell what species made them, how many there were, which direction they were travelling in and whether one was injured. We can also tell how old the tracks are; in other words, we can form a narrative from the information in the tracks and use it to make some predictions. Some people believe this is how evolving humans began to tell stories and maybe where written communications has its origins.
The study and its significance for archaeology is explained in a press release from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU), Erlangen-Nürnberg:
Namibian tracking experts enable researchers from FAU and the University of Cologne to analyze images of animal tracks in rock art.
Rock faces in Namibia are decorated with hundreds of stone-age images not only of animals and human footprints, but also of animal tracks. These have been largely neglected to date as researchers lacked the knowledge required to interpret them.
Archaeologists from FAU and the University of Cologne have now worked together with animal tracking experts from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Tsumkwe, Namibia, to investigate the engraved animal tracks on six rock faces in more detail, and were able to determine detailed information on the species, age, sex, limbs, side of the body, trackway and relative direction of the tracks. Their findings have now been published in the journal PLOS ONE.
In the Doro !nawas mountains in the Namib desert in northwest Central Namibia, vegetation is sparse, trees and bushes generally only grow along small dry river beds. Thanks to various permanent waterholes, however, there is an unusually high occurrence of different animals: springboks, giraffes, elephants, lions and leopards all cross the area.
The area remains untouched by humans at the current time. It is not inhabited or exploited in any other way. It was a different story in the past, however. Numerous instances of rock art representing animals as well as human footprints and animal tracks show that stone age hunters and gatherers lived here in the past.Until now, archaeologists have only been able to interpret the species of the animals depicted in the rock art. Animal tracks tended to be classified together with the abstract symbols. “Researchers have until now completely neglected the fact that traces and tracks are also a valuable source of information,” explains PD Dr. Andreas Pastoors from the Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory at FAU.
Pictures: Andreas Pastoors/Tracking in Caves
Together with his FAU colleagues Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier and Dr. Tilman Lenssen-Erz from the African Research Institute at the University of Cologne, Pastoors has therefore taken a new approach, merging western archaeological science with indigenous knowledge in an innovative research project. The project began in 2013, when San tracking experts from Namibia read human footprints on the floor of caves in France decorated with rock art from the Ice Age.
Now together with the Namibian tracking experts Tsamgao Ciqae, Ui Kxunta and Thui Thao from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, the three researchers set up camp for approximately one week in the Doro !nawas mountains, and investigated six rock faces depicting a particularly large number of human footprints and animal tracks.
The investigated rock faces are at the edge of an area resembling a crater with a diameter of approximately one kilometer in the Doro !nawas mountains. “At the upper edge there are large boulders with flat surfaces which people in the Stone Age decorated with rock art,” explains Pastoors.
The rock art shows various different motifs, ranging from human footprints to people and animals such as elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses and ostriches. “These images are easily recognizable by western archaeologists,” says Pastoors. However, they also depict animal tracks that have until now only been classified together with the abstract symbols.
“Seen from the perspective of western art history, researchers are unable to recognize anything in these images, as they are lacking the relevant expertise. For this reason, the tracks have not yet been assessed as a legible source of information, which has in turn led to misleading hierarchies being created with regard to the value of the various images.”
Stone age illustrations of animal tracks prove to be a valuable source of information.
The study that has now been published counteracts this trend. Tsamgao Ciqae, Ui Kxunta und Thui Thao have discovered surprising details in the rock art. In more than 90 percent of the analyzed 513 images they were able to determine the species, age range, sex, specific limbs, side of the body and the direction of the animal tracks or human footprints.
Interestingly, the animal tracks indicated a larger variety of species than those in the pictures of animals illustrated in profile in rock art in neighboring regions. The team of researchers was able to identify 20 further animal species in the animal tracks, ranging from bushpig, buffalo, monkey and caracal to various different types of antelopes (duiker, bushbuck, roan antelope, ibex), to bird species such as red-crested korhaan and marabou.
One rather surprising aspect is that some of these species require damper conditions than those found in this part of Namibia, at least at the current time. But then why did the stone-age artists draw them? How did they know about them? “We cannot answer these questions with the state of research as it stands at present,” admits Pastoors. However, it is plausible that the artists knew other regions with damper environmental conditions, as the Doro !nawas mountains were similarly dry as they are today.”
In addition, the analyses show patterns that are obviously the result of cultural preferences. This includes, for example, the relative direction of the individual animal tracks that the tracking experts were able to decipher from the images. “We beamed a virtual clock onto the rock face and then noted the direction of the tracks according to the hours on the clock face.”
The result: Most tracks pointed upwards towards 12 o’clock, only a few pointed down towards 6 o’clock. The one exception were the zebra tracks. They were depicted traveling in all directions. “It’s really exciting to see that the animal tracks can give us far more information that we originally thought,” summarizes Pastoors.
For him, the study is also a “further confirmation of the fact that indigenous knowledge with its extensive insights in a number of different subject areas has a valuable contribution to make towards driving archaeological research forward.”
Technical details and more images, including the names of the many different species depicted, are given in the researchers' open access paper in PLOS ONE:
Abstract
Namibia is rich in hunter-gatherer rock art from the Later Stone Age (LSA); this is a tradition of which well-executed engravings of animal tracks in large numbers are characteristic. Research into rock art usually groups these motifs together with geometric signs; at best, therefore, it may provide summary lists of them. To date, the field has completely disregarded the fact that tracks and trackways are a rich medium of information for hunter-gatherers, alongside their deeper, culture-specific connotations. A recent research project, from which this article has emerged, has attempted to fill this research gap; it entailed indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari analysing engraved animal tracks and human footprints in a rock art region in central Western Namibia, the Doro! nawas Mountains, which is the site of recently discovered rock art. The experts were able to define the species, sex, age group and exact leg of the specific animal or human depicted in more than 90% of the engravings they analysed (N = 513). Their work further demonstrates that the variety of fauna is much richer in engraved tracks than in depictions of animals in the same engraving tradition. The analyses reveal patterns that evidently arise from culturally determined preferences. The study represents further confirmation that indigenous knowledge, with its profound insights into a range of particular fields, has the capacity to considerably advance archaeological research.
Fig 1. Map of the research area.
Area covered by the research conducted by a team from Goethe University (Frankfurt); many of the sites are new discoveries. The arrow points to the two sites discussed in this article. Red = rock engravings; green = rock paintings; purple circles = permanent open water; black symbol = /Ui//aes-Twyfelfontein World Heritage Site.
Map by J. Behringer and P. Breunig.
Fig 2. Layout of rock art sites RAS 6, RAS 7 and RAS 8.
Aerial view of the layout of rock art sites RAS 6, RAS 7 and RAS 8.
Photographs by O. Breunig
Photogrammetry and map by P. Breunig.
Fig 3. Main panel of the RAS 8 rock art site.
RAS 8-O is the panel with the highest concentration of animal track engravings, amounting to almost 300 in number (images of engravings are digitally enhanced).Photographs and artwork by P. Breunig.
Fig 4. Hidden panel of the RAS 8 rock art site.
The narrow corridor RAS 8-N, with engravings on both sides which extend as far inside as the lower exfoliated rock face; from the position of the photographer at the entrance, this is situated roughly three metres into the corridor.
Photograph: T. Lenssen-Erz.
Fig 5. Large human figures at rock art site RAS 8.
Panel RAS 8-A, showing, alongside the usual canon of animals, several human figures of up to 1 m in height, some men and at least one woman, all in the same position with their arm(s) extended to the right.
Photograph by T. Lenssen-Erz.
Fig 6. Large engraving of an elephant at rock art site RAS 8.
Particularly large (height: 1.6 m) naturalistic elephant engraving on panel RAS 8.
Photograph by T. Lenssen-Erz.
Fig 7. Documentation of rock art.
Section of panel RAS 8-O, showing the individual sequential numbers for all engravings (digitally enhanced; height of section: c. 1.8 m).
Photograph and artwork by P. Breunig.
Fig 8. Exceptional panel from the RAS 6 rock art site.
RAS 6-C is the most visible panel of RAS 6, featuring depictions of extraordinarily detailed giraffes and ostriches (above: engravings in their original condition; below: digitally enhanced images of the engravings).
Photographs and artwork by P. Breunig.
Fig 10. Examples of ‘frequently’ depicted animal tracks.
Fig 11. Examples of the ‘less frequently’ depicted animal tracks.
Fig 12. Examples of the ‘rarely’ depicted animal tracks.The sequence in columns represents the order of number of occurrences. The scale of reproduction differs from picture to picture; all tracks are shown in upward direction (irrespective of their actual direction on the rock face); all tracks are digitally enhanced (excerpts from Fig 3).Photographs and artwork by P. Breunig.Lenssen-Erz T, Pastoors A, Uthmeier T, Ciqae T, Kxunta /, Thao T (2023)
Animal tracks and human footprints in prehistoric hunter-gatherer rock art of the Doro! nawas mountains (Namibia), analysed by present-day indigenous tracking experts.
PLoS ONE 18(9): e0289560. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289560
Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by PLOS. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
I wonder if it ever occurs to creationists that the fact that 99.99% of the history of Earth occurred before they think Earth was created, might be a problem for creationism. The fact that these rock carvings in Africa are a mere 10,000 years older than Earth doesn't seem to worry them at all because creationism is not only a counter-factual belief, it's also a belief that continues despite all the scientific evidence against it. This tsunami of evidence is regarded as evidence that all the world's scientists, together with their laboratory staff, and all the staff who produce the scientific journals, are part of a massive international conspiracy to turn people away from creationism.
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