One of Perito Morelos claims to fame, indeed a top tourist attraction of Santa Cruz province they say, is the Cave of Hands. They make mural representations of the cave in town;
It’s a provincial park in the desert down thirty miles of bad washboard so we bagged it. The production three hours driving at six o’clock at night put us off and Layne knew there was a museum dedicated to the cave in town.
The museum is dedicated to the memory of Carlos Gradín, 1918-2002, who carried out the scientific investigation of the cave paintings. Local farmers and farm workers had known about several such caves in the area but it was only in 1941 when a local priest first photographed them.
Gradín came across them when he was working in the area as a land surveyor in the 1960s and as he realized he was onto something he went back to Buenos Aires and convinced the academics he wasn’t too old to become a late blooming archeologist. Eight years later…he came back in his new career and devoted his life to the paintings. Nowadays they are a tourist attraction next to the Patagonia National Park (no dogs allowed).
Gradín had a camera and a mobile dark room which boggled my mind a bit.
His wife, Gradin and a pupil:
It was a different world back then as they excavated and kept notes with pen and paper. The caves were painted over millennia which is a bit hard to comprehend, between 7,000 and 700 BC.
The artists belonged to the earliest inhabitants of Patagonia about whom not much is known, not even what they called themselves. But they left behind bits and pieces of their daily lives and the tools they used to paint so scientists gathered dates from those artifacts.
Our guide showed off another weird Patagonian animal, some sort of cross between a very large hare and a beaver. This creature lives in the cliffs which it climbs apparently like a goat. These creatures along with armadillos and guanacos formed the local human diet.
A guanaco leather shoe found in the cave. I was fascinated by the fact it was easily identifiable plus they found a soft insert made from grasses. They liked their comfort.
Fortunately for the cave dwellers they seemed to like guanaco meat because they hunted them and butchered them all over the place.
They were people who hadn’t yet encountered the bow but they used some pretty sophisticated weapons to hunt.
They had a spear made of bamboo cane with a removable tip so the haft would fall away had the guanaco would be stuck only by the tip. To increase the force they used a launcher held in the hand to propel the spear further and harder.
And in their spare time they made cave paintings possibly to tell stories or to teach youngsters how to identify their prey and hunting tactics.
They had a kids room as part of the museum.
The painters used brushes and bones to paint. They filled hollow bones and blew the pigment onto the walls. They’ve noticed most painters were right handed as they painted their left hands and they even found one six fingered hand.
One other thing archeologists found was that some pigments aren’t found in nature but must have been created by heating up the yellows and reds that do exist naturally. Geologically South America has changed, ice in the Andes have shrunk and the coasts too, shown below by the white edges that used to be above water and no longer are.
And back then prehistoric wild animals developed in their own way.
They out grew humans by a long way too. Check out the human below to give the animals scale:
Gradín’s family…
…and himself, all on the job.
It would have been a long hard slog to drive out there. Maybe we should have arrived earlier in the day. Maybe we could have left Rusty aboard GANNET2 while we took the cave tour.
Now we’ll never know.
