The Jinsha River Basin is one of the important passages for the migration of ancient humans in the Neo-Paleolithic Era, and it is also an area where multi-ethnic cultures are integrated. Since the late 1980s, cultural relics and archaeologists on the mainland have discovered the famous Jinsha River petroglyphs. So far, more than 70 petroglyph points have been discovered in the Jinsha River basin.
Tiger Leaping Gorge Man-made Cave Rock Painting Point
Through these simple and realistic petroglyphs, animal figures including bison, deer, rock sheep, wild boar, monkeys, wild donkeys, bears and tigers can be recognized. In addition, there are figures, bows and arrows, handprints and abstract patterns.
So, these petroglyphs were left by ancient people who lived about many years ago?
Recently, the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Yunnan Province, in cooperation with Nanjing Normal University, Wuhan University and other units, published the latest paper on rock paintings on the Jinsha River in the journal of archaeological science, a top international archaeological journal.
The researchers selected a place called the Wanren Cave in the Tiger Leaping Gorge of the Jinsha River, and through the carbonate deposits collected from the cave, they used uranium dating to determine the dating period of these petroglyphs (more than 13,000 years to more than 8,000 years ago), confirming for the first time that the mainland has preserved Paleolithic painted petroglyphs.
This also makes the Jinsha River rock paintings the earliest rock paintings in China and even in the entire East Asian region, with absolute data to support the era.
One of the petroglyphs in the cave depicts a sheep
On the morning of February 26, Red Star News reporters contacted Wu Hu, the first author of the paper and a librarian of the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. She told reporters that accurate dating of ancient Paleolithic petroglyphs has always been a worldwide archaeological problem.
"The main difficulty is that it is difficult to find a suitable sample for dating." Wu Hu said. "Under the premise of protecting the ruins, we cannot directly scrape off the pigments on the petroglyphs (a kind of ochre pigment processed from iron ore) to measure the age, so we can only use substances related to petroglyphs." For example, calcium carbonate (which is also a component of stalactites) is resolved from the rocks to which the petroglyphs are attached. ”
However, calcium carbonate samples are not suitable for carbon-14 dating. The high-precision uranium dating technology used this time has only matured in recent years. Thanks to this technological advance, only 5 to 10 mg of carbonate crystals from the rock wall are needed to accurately date the petroglyphs.
After measurement, the researchers found that the Man-in-Man Cave could be accurately reconstructed in at least three drawing stages: 13580 to 13000 years ago, 10830 to 10540 years ago, and 8700 to 8370 years ago, in the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene, significantly earlier than the earliest agricultural era in the region (about 4600 years ago).
Carbonate deposits associated with petroglyphs
For more than 10,000 years, the erosion of carbonate crystals on the rock wall and the natural peeling of the surface of the rock wall have caused a considerable number of petroglyphs to be blurred and the lines are difficult to read. But under these conditions, the researchers still carried out a lot of fruitful work: they used the petroglyph style to confirm that the Jinshajiang petroglyphs belonged to hunter-gatherer petroglyphs and resembled the cave petroglyphs of the Paleolithic Magdelin period in Europe. The newly published study opens the prelude to the discovery and research of Paleolithic painted petroglyphs in China with high-precision dating.
Over the past century, thousands of petroglyphs have been discovered in China. Based on distribution, style and technology, Professor Zhang Yasha of the Center for Chinese Rock Art of minzu University of China divides Chinese petroglyphs into four geographical regions - the northern grassland area, the eastern coastal area, the southwest mountainous area and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region.
Jinshajiang rock paintings are the oldest painted rock paintings in East Asia with dating data records, and are also a unique taxon different from other petroglyphs in China, similar to the Paleolithic rock paintings found in France, Spain and Southeast Asia in Europe, and are important cultural relics carriers of prehistoric culture in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, which is of great significance for exploring the "roots of civilization" in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. ”
Red Star News reporter Qiao Xueyang According to the interviewee, Jiang Qing
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