Cueva de Los Manos

As we drove away from the Villa La Angostura estancia, there were some wetlands right alongside the gravel road…

… and that sight above just made me smile.

There were gorgeous Chiloe Wigeons shimmering in the morning light -

Very quickly, the land turned barren and contained Guanaco butts…

… and Rheas. These are Darwin’s (Lesser) Rheas and they live on the steppes of Patagonia, in both Argentina and Chile -

We were surprised at how fleshy the foot was -

In this species, the males incubate the eggs and raise the young. This was a large group of “adolescents”…

… that we surprised as we were driving by -

Our next destination was Cueva de Los Manos (Cave of the Hands)…

… and it was quite challenging to get to.

This is a glimpse into the canyon of the Rio Pinturas -

We had to go with a guided tour, but we learned quite a bit. These paintings are between 13,000 and 9,300 yrs old, and there has been no restoration here.

These are called “negative” paintings, because the hand is placed upon the rock, and the pigment is blown through a hollow bone over the hand.

The pigments are yellow/ochre (oldest), red (iron oxide), white (limestone), black (manganese or charcoal) or green (youngest). You’ll see samples of these colors in later blogs from a different/nearby site.

The guide told us that in the picture above, the guanacos are pregnant, and the white circle depicts the full moon, when they give birth.

More recent drawings were more abstract, or depicted objects such as a lizard…

… that were painted onto the rock. The paint was a mixture of pigment, liquid (water, milk or blood) and some type of adhesive.

This was a look at how the site looked to us -

In this next picture, you can see the paintings of the Rhea feet (in the middle) -

I just loved the large panels of numerous hands -

The six-fingered man (oh no!) -

More recent panels had abstract depictions…

… and told stories of rounding up guanacos for a hunt -

The guide said that this large red circle around this hand meant it probably signified the shaman or elder at the time -

This was the valley that we were looking into as we walked along the rock wall with the art -

This is what the site looked like to us, as we toured. We were impressed with how close we could be (without touching, obviously) and how well it had been preserved, despite the harsh climate -

Just a quick explanatory note - these paintings are the oldest in the Americas, but there are negative paintings of hands like these that are 45,000 yrs old in Indonesia!

Quite the forbidding location — that’s all gravel road, despite the guardrails -

As we proceeded to our lodging for the next few nights, we passed some gorgeously colored hills…

… which were probably the location of the pigments for the paintings we saw. We actually stayed within the park…

… and had rheas near the front porch -

G’night from the desert -