Around 50,000 years after it was painted, authorities in Brazil uncovered what may be the oldest depiction of a kiss, reports local outlet Correio Braziliense. The remarkable image was recently uncovered by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (known by its Portuguese initials ICMBio), part of the Ministry of the Environment, in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park.
Located in northeastern Brazil, the park is home to the largest collection of prehistoric rock paintings in the Americas, some 35,000 spread across more than 1,300 archaeological sites. UNESCO recognised Serra da Capivara National Park as a World Heritage Site in 1991, calling its numerous rock shelters and cave paintings “an outstanding testimony to one of the oldest human communities of South America.”
The “kiss” painting – if that is indeed what it depicts – is among the oldest, dating back some 50,000 years ago to around the start of the Upper Palaeolithic period. That it has survived so long is the result of the area’s dry climate, the characteristics of sandstone rock, and the use of natural pigments like iron oxides and charcoal, which are quite durable under those conditions.
Depictions of wild animals and humans dominate the works at Serra da Capivara, often arrayed in complex scenes of hunting, skirmishing, dancing and sexual activity.
[See more: A deep cave in Timor-Leste shines a light into humanity’s past]
The animals that appear include species familiar today, such as red deer, jaguars, tapirs and giant rhea, usually shown in a running stance as though they are fleeing the hunters. Rock shelters in the area help with dating the rock paintings, rich with hundreds of artefacts and hearths that can be dated more easily than the paintings themselves.
Cave paintings can be found on every continent save Antarctica and offer a unique window into the lives of our ancient ancestors. Animals and human figures, as well as outlines of human hands and abstract patterns, are common across time and region.
The oldest known figurative cave painting was discovered last July in Indonesia, a complex image of a wild pig and three human-like figures that is at least 51,200 years old. It marked the oldest evidence of storytelling, something that likely existed for much longer, but “words do not fossilise,” as Professor Maxime Aubert from Griffith University in Australia told the BBC at the time. “[The] Sulawesi art is now the oldest such evidence by far that is known to archaeology.”
The oldest known rock painting is an abstract crosshatch of lines drawn in ochre crayon some 73,000 years ago in the Blombos Cave, an archaeological site in South Africa. The tiny piece of painted rock is believed to have been part of a larger cobble, found by chance in 2011. Francesco d’Errico, a researcher on the team at the University of Bordeaux, told The Guardian in 2018 that it was the “first known drawing in human history.”
