Rock art in Venezuela may reveal traces of a vanished culture (12 photos + 1 video)

Venezuelan archaeologists have discovered 20 previously unknown rock art sites dating back thousands of years. These drawings, found in Canaima National Park, are artifacts of “a new, previously unknown culture,” said research team leader José Miguel Pérez-Gómez of Simon Bolivar University in Caracas.





The rock paintings, done in red pigment, include geometric motifs (dots, crosses, stars, lines), as well as stylized images of leaves and human figures. Some images were carved in stone (petroglyphs).









The purpose of these drawings remains a mystery. “We cannot know the thoughts of people who lived several thousand years ago, but these signs definitely had ritual significance,” Perez-Gomez suggested. They could be associated with birth, illness, renewal of nature, or hunting. The rock art sites were probably "significant in the landscape, just as churches are significant to people today."



The exact age of the drawings is still unknown, but there are suggestions that they are approximately 4000 years old (by analogy with similar cave paintings in Brazil). However, Perez-Gomez believes that the Venezuelan finds may be more ancient.



Canaima National Park is a huge park the size of Belgium, comprising forests and mountainous terrain. One of its most famous attractions is Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall on land in the world.



According to Pérez-Gómez, the park may have become "point zero," the center of the emergence of this mysterious culture, and then it spread to such remote regions as the Amazon, Guiana and even southern Colombia, where there are cave paintings similar to those recently found in Venezuela.







During the research, pottery shards and stone tools were found in 20 rock art sites. Further research is needed to confirm their attribution to the creators of the drawings. It is expected that as a result of continued work in Canaima National Park, more mysterious rock carvings will be discovered.





The results of the study were presented at the congress on prehistoric archeology “New Worlds - New Ideas” in Italy in June 2023. An article about one of the rock art sites was published in the journal Rock Art Research in November 2023.