Dec 1, 2025 07:37 PM
PRESS RELEASE: 6,000-year old West Texas rock art influenced Mesoamerican cosmology
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‘Breathtaking’ 6,000-year-old Texas murals overturn myth of random rock art
https://interestingengineering.com/cultu...s-rock-art
EXCERPTS: For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the “Pecos River Style,” inside remote limestone rock shelters.
These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall. In a dramatic announcement by Texas State University, researchers revealed that “the canyons of Southwest Texas house a vast and ancient library of painted texts documenting 175 generations of sacred stories and indigenous knowledge.”
[...] To pinpoint the art’s origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed the tradition’s start at an astonishing 6,000 years ago.
“But it didn’t stop there,” Boyd explained to Texas State. “Using the same graphic style, symbol system, and rules of paint application, they continued to create these visual manuscripts for more than 4,000 years.”
These paintings—featuring humanlike, animal-like, and geometric figures—were previously assumed to be random additions, slowly expanded by different groups over time. The bombshell research, just published in Science Advances, dismantled that theory.
“Another huge shocker is that the dates within many of the murals clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event as a visual narrative,” Boyd said. “This contradicts the commonly held belief that the murals were a random collection of images that accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years.” (MORE - missing details)
-- - - - - - - - - - - -
‘Breathtaking’ 6,000-year-old Texas murals overturn myth of random rock art
https://interestingengineering.com/cultu...s-rock-art
EXCERPTS: For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the “Pecos River Style,” inside remote limestone rock shelters.
These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall. In a dramatic announcement by Texas State University, researchers revealed that “the canyons of Southwest Texas house a vast and ancient library of painted texts documenting 175 generations of sacred stories and indigenous knowledge.”
[...] To pinpoint the art’s origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed the tradition’s start at an astonishing 6,000 years ago.
“But it didn’t stop there,” Boyd explained to Texas State. “Using the same graphic style, symbol system, and rules of paint application, they continued to create these visual manuscripts for more than 4,000 years.”
These paintings—featuring humanlike, animal-like, and geometric figures—were previously assumed to be random additions, slowly expanded by different groups over time. The bombshell research, just published in Science Advances, dismantled that theory.
“Another huge shocker is that the dates within many of the murals clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event as a visual narrative,” Boyd said. “This contradicts the commonly held belief that the murals were a random collection of images that accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years.” (MORE - missing details)