via Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, August 2023: A recent study in the Jinsha River valley, China, has discovered over 70 rock painting sites featuring naturalistic animal paintings that bear similarities to the world’s oldest hunting-gathering rock art, with the age estimation of the Baiyunwan rock paintings falling between 7.09-8.93 thousand years ago, providing new evidence of early Holocene rock art in the region.
More than 70 rock painting sites have been discovered in the Jinsha River valley in northwestern Yunnan Province of southwestern China. These sites are dominated by naturalistic animal paintings and display certain similarities with the oldest hunting–gathering rock art discovered across the world. The Baiyunwan rock shelter is representative of the corpus of the Jinsha rock-art sites, comprising 15 identifiable naturalistic animal paintings in addition to several unidentifiable paintings. However, to date, the age estimation of these precious rock paintings lacks precision. Thus, this study performed U-series dating of carbonate samples (in total, 32 subsamples) to constrain the minimum and maximum ages of the Baiyunwan rock paintings. The U-series ages were corrected with a site-specific value of the initial 230Th/232Th ratio determined by isochron analyses, and the age reliability was evaluated by stratified dating analyses. Moreover, we used Bayesian age modeling to combine the individual age estimates and considered previously published data. The age range of the Baiyunwan rock paintings was determined as 7.09–8.93 ka, with a probability of 95 %. This age estimate corresponds to the late painting phase documented at Wanrendong Cave (∼8.37–8.70 ka), located within the same region, and provides new evidence for early Holocene naturalistic rock paintings in the Jinsha River valley, Yunnan, southwestern China.
