Prehistoric Carvings Are So Accurate, Animals’ Sex, Age, and Species Can Be Determined
3rd October 2023
The animal footprint carvings you can find in the Doro Nawas Mountains of western Namibia are quite something: the artists have captured the tracks so accurately, they can reveal plenty of useful information about the animals they represent.
A team from the Heinrich Barth Institute and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, worked with Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari region to look at a total of 513 carvings.
For more than 90 percent of them, Indigenous experts could identify the species, sex, age group, and even which leg the carving was from. It’s like a wildlife compendium, written in rock.