Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 Three outlined human hands, fingers spread, overlapping

Cueva de las Manos (hand stencils)

A rock shelter high above the Pinturas river canyon in Santa Cruz, Argentine Patagonia, its walls crowded with more than 800 stencilled hands beside paintings of guanacos and hunts. People painted here for some 8,000 years, from about 9,300 years ago until about 1,300 years ago.

Cave and rock art. Also called cave hand prints, cave of hands, hand prints in caves, hand stencils.

Meaning

The Cueva de las Manos, the “cave of the hands”, is a cave and a series of painted rock faces in the cliffs of the Río Pinturas canyon, a few hours’ drive from the town of Perito Moreno. The rock wall that screens its entrance is covered in hand stencils. Each was made by holding a hand against the rock and putting paint around it, leaving the hand’s shape in bare rock. Argentina’s nomination to UNESCO counts more than 800 hands, most of them left hands, of children, young people and adults, women and men, some with the forearm. The same technique was used on the feet of the ñandú, the rhea or “American ostrich”. The painters ground mineral pigments, iron oxides for red and purple, kaolin for white, natrojarosite for yellow and manganese oxide for black, and mixed them with a binder that has not survived; the nomination guesses water or grease and notes that gypsum was sometimes added. Beside the hands are guanacos, still common in the region, hunters and later geometric designs. The archaeologist Carlos Gradin suggested that the last painters may have been ancestors of the Tehuelche, the hunter-gatherers whom nineteenth-century travellers met in Patagonia, and descendants of Tehuelche families of the river basin still remember living there. The site is a National Historic Monument of Argentina and, since 1999, a World Heritage site. Its stencils are pictographs, painted images; the page on Petroglyphs explains the difference from carved ones.

Origin and history

The first outsider to write about the area, as the nomination tells it, was Musters, an English traveller who crossed Patagonia with Southern Tehuelche companions in the mid-nineteenth century and called it “the land of the devil” for the hardship of the journey. In 1904 Clemente Onelli, an Italian scientist working for the Argentine government, named it the Valley of the Paintings, because local women climbed the canyon slopes for coloured earth, which they mixed with rhea grease to paint their guanaco-skin capes. Alberto De Agostini published the first photographs of the hands and guanacos in 1941, and Menghin, in 1952 and 1957, defined two Patagonian styles from the site: “negativos de manos”, hand stencils, and “escenas”, scenes. For more than thirty years Carlos Gradin, with Ana Aguerre and Carlos Aschero, studied the paintings and excavated at the cave mouth.

Excavation and radiocarbon dating put the first occupation at about 9,300 years before the present. Argentina’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano (INAPL) gives about 9,400 years, with people coming back for more than 8,000 years, until about 1,300 years ago. UNESCO’s own short description gives an older and narrower span, 13,000 to 9,500 years ago, which matches neither the nomination nor the longer description on the same UNESCO page.

The national congress declared the cave a National Historic Monument in 1993. INAPL, which had begun a programme to document and protect Argentina’s rock art in 1995, put the nomination together, and UNESCO inscribed the site on 4 December 1999. The dry air, the lack of seeping water and the sound rock have kept most of the paintings in excellent condition. Tourism has not: UNESCO lists graffiti, pieces of painted rock taken away, touching, dust and litter, which measures since have reduced.

Four styles over eight thousand years

Gradin sorted the paintings into four groups from the way later ones lie over earlier ones. Stylistic Group A, from the first occupation, is hunting: guanacos surrounded, ambushed or chased by hunters throwing bolas, stone balls used as weapons, and in some scenes a ring of ten or twelve men around a herd of twenty. Hands are there from the start. In Group B, from before 7,000 to about 3,300 years ago, the hunts stop; single guanacos stand still with swollen bellies, and the walls fill with layer on layer of hand stencils in red, purple, orange, ochre, yellow, white, black and a little green. Group B1 is more schematic. Group C, the last, about 1,300 years ago, is bright red: zigzags, lines, dots, circles and stick-like people and animals painted over everything before.

Hands on cave walls elsewhere

Hand stencils are among the oldest images people made, and dating keeps pushing them back. In 2012 Pike’s team dated calcite over a hand stencil at El Castillo in northern Spain to at least 37,300 years ago. In 2014 Aubert’s team put one in the Maros caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia, at a minimum of 39,900 years. In 2018 Hoffmann’s team dated a stencil at Maltravieso in Spain to more than 64,800 years and attributed it to Neanderthals, a claim other archaeologists dispute (see cave art signs). In 2026 Oktaviana’s team reported a stencil on Muna Island, Sulawesi, with a minimum age of 67,800 years, the oldest yet. Genevieve von Petzinger, who counts the negative hand among the 32 recurring signs of Ice Age Europe, finds it most common there between 40,000 and 22,000 years ago; she suggests it may have marked that a person had been at a site, stood for a person or group, or even been an early sign language. Chauvet has red hands both printed and stencilled. Those of the Cueva de las Manos are far younger, and they are the ones whose makers’ possible descendants are known.

See also

Petroglyphs, Lascaux cave paintings, Chauvet Cave, Altamira Cave, Venus of Willendorf, Lion Man.

Sources

  1. Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas (UNESCO), UNESCO World Heritage List, property 936, “Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas”, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Description; Brief synthesis; Integrity; Protection
  2. The Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas: nomination file and ICOMOS evaluation (UNESCO, 1999), Argentina, nomination of “The Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas” to the World Heritage List, with the ICOMOS evaluation (property 936), UNESCO World Heritage Centre, nomination, pp. 13–16 (3.a Description, 3.b History and development); ICOMOS evaluation, “History and Description”
  3. Cueva de las Manos (INAPL), Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano, “Cueva de las Manos” (news, December 2023), Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano (Ministerio de Cultura, Argentina), news item
  4. Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi (Oktaviana et al., Nature 2026), A. A. Oktaviana, R. Joannes-Boyau, B. Hakim et al., “Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi”, Nature 650 (2026): 652–656, Nature, abstract (Europe PMC record)
  5. Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia (Aubert et al., Nature 2014), M. Aubert, A. Brumm, M. Ramli et al., “Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia”, Nature 514 (2014): 223–227, Nature, abstract (Europe PMC record)
  6. U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain (Pike et al., Science 2012), A. W. G. Pike, D. L. Hoffmann, M. García-Diez et al., “U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain”, Science 336 (2012): 1409–1413, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  7. U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art (Hoffmann et al., Science 2018), D. L. Hoffmann, C. D. Standish, M. García-Diez et al., “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art”, Science 359 (2018): 912–915, Science (AAAS), abstract (Europe PMC record)
  8. What the mysterious symbols made by early humans can teach us (TED Ideas, interview with Genevieve von Petzinger), TED Ideas, “What the mysterious symbols made by early humans can teach us about how we evolved”, interview with Genevieve von Petzinger, TED Conferences, section “Could a handmark mean ‘I was here’?” and caption
  9. Aurignacian cave art (Chauvet, Ministère de la Culture), Ministère de la Culture, Chauvet cave: “Aurignacian cave art”, Ministère de la Culture (France), Research › Aurignacian cave art

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

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