San trackers help unlock secrets of spoor and rock art
In a first, trackers were able to identify not only different species from images of animals, humans and spoor left by hunter-gatherers, but also the sex of the animals and humans in the prints
Conservation superhero says it’s all about beauty
Across rock panels in the Doro !Nawas mountains in central western Namibia, three San trackers were tasked with following spoor that cut across rock.
The men from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Tsumkwe in Namibia usually use their skills to track game for hunters or tourists, but this was something totally different. The tracks here were human-made and engraved into the rockface. On six rock panels are images of animals and humans and trackways of spoor all left by Stone Age hunter-gatherers who painstakingly etched each print into the rock.
Until Tsamgao Ciqae, Ui Kxunta and Thui Thao cast their eyes on the pictographs, archaeologists had spent little time studying these footprints that had been cast in stone.
The surprise was that the trackers were able not only to identify different species from these prints, but also the sex of the animals and humans these engravings were meant to depict.
The research, which was published on 13 September in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, is the latest study for which San trackers have teamed up with archaeologists and used their tracking skills to interpret the past.
Previously, the team of trackers worked in France and Spain, where they studied ancient human footprints that were left in a series of caves tens of thousands of years ago. They were able to deduce not only the ages and the sex of the earlier humans who had left the prints, but could also tell archaeologists what the owners of the prints may have been doing inside those caves.
A valuable source of information
What the three trackers discovered when they examined the Doro !Nawas mountain pictographs was that a great deal of care had been put into carving the prints – so much so that they were able to identify 90% of the 513 engravings.
The animal spoor identified included bushpig, buffalo, monkey and caracal, as well as various antelope. There were even bird tracks that the trackers identified as belonging to red-crested korhaan and marabou.
“Researchers have until now completely neglected the fact that traces and tracks are also a valuable source of information,” explained Dr Andreas Pastoors, from the Friedrich-alexander-universität Erlangen-nürnber in Germany, in a statement. Pastoors was the lead author in the study.
The trackers were also able to note another interesting detail about some of the spoor. The tracks “moved” in certain directions.
“We beamed a virtual clock onto the rockface and then noted the direction of the tracks according to the hours on the clock face.”
The result: most tracks pointed upwards towards 12 o’clock and only a few pointed down towards 6 o’clock. The one exception was the zebra tracks, which were depicted travelling in all directions.
“It’s really exciting to see that the animal tracks can give us far more information than we originally thought,” said Pastoors.
Another surprise is that some of the animal species depicted in the rock art are not found in this part of Namibia, as they require wetter habitats. The researchers believe that either conditions were wetter then, or that the artists had travelled to other regions and had seen those animals there.
But the mystery is just why these hunter-gatherers went to such great lengths to so accurately recreate the spoor.
The San suggested that perhaps the images were “teaching aids” to help younger wannabe trackers identify spoor correctly.
The problem with this hypothesis, the researchers point out in the paper, is that some of the sites are hard to access. Another theory is that they were used for shamanistic rituals.
The late rock art researcher and author Ed Eastwood had suggested that engraved spoor might have been used by hunters in a ceremony to gain power over the animal they were about to track.
Accounts of San hunting practices tell of hunters striking the spoor of the animal they were about to track with a spear.
Eastwood had studied similar engraved prints that were found in the Limpopo valley in South Africa.
But finding the answer to why those hunter-gatherers did this all that time ago is going to be difficult.
“We don’t know the meaning of any Stone Age rock art in the world because we don’t have the Rosetta Stone,” said Pastoors.
“Our study has shown how much information is hidden in the depiction of human tracks and footprints, and that we can capture it with the right knowledge.
“In the future, it will be difficult not to involve track experts in the study of Stone Age tracks.”