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– [Narrator] As a paleoanthropolgist,
Genevieve Von Petzinger studies
the origins and development of early humans.
And today she’s exploring the ancient rock art
of the indigenous Coso people.
– So, we’ve got an asterisk right here, and then right here,
so here’s the horns, and there’s its front legs,
and its back legs so it’s facing that way.
– [Narrator] Genevieve is in the Coso range
of California’s Mojave desert, an area inhabited
by the Coso people at least 12,000 years ago.
– So at the moment,
I am standing in a place called Fossil Falls.
This used to be a waterfall.
The Coso people lived right in this vicinity.
And so you can think of this sort of dried out waterfall
as being their backyard.
And just like we do today, they decorated their backyard.
– [Narrator] Genevieve is searching for ancient petroglyphs,
prehistoric rock art that can date back thousands of years.
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(screen wooshes)
And hidden within these volcanic caves
there’s plenty to discover.
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– This is basically like a big tube
that goes from surface level down into the falls.
We’ve only been here for about 15 minutes so far
and just in this one little area we’ve already found
some new engravings, which is really exciting!
We’ve not only found the serpentiform outside
but we’ve also found a little asterisk,
so like a little star back there in the corner,
this wonderful bighorn sheep,
and these sheep are a really popular, really important motif
that we find here with the Coso.
And then here, so there’s a spiral,
so you can see there’s just a little spirally shape…
They’ve taken a stone tool and they’ve basically
kind of run it along the rock and it takes that dark rock
and then it shows the white stone underneath.
And so now, these are thousands of years old,
and they’re kind of fading a bit
but when they were first made
it must and been really dramatic, it would have been
the white popping out of the dark rock.
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– [Narrator] And it’s not just the symbols
that Genevieve’s interested in.
The acoustics in the caves might have some meaning as well.
– We were noticing that there’s some marks
almost where it looks like they took their stone
and stabbed it into the rock, and probably,
because there’s some really interesting acoustic properties.
So the way it sounds in here when I’m talking,
there’s a really interesting echo going on.
(rock clacking)
So, it’s interesting to wonder
if it wasn’t just about the pictures,
but maybe also about the sound at the same time.
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– [Narrator] Carved and painted rock art
can be found throughout the world,
telling stories from an ancient past.
– If you think about it these are like the great, great,
great, great grandparents of emojis.
Simple little characters
with huge amounts of information embedded into them.
But you need to be part of the culture group
to be able to decipher it.
You have to know the code.
– [Narrator] But even without fully understanding
what the symbols mean,
Genevieve can still find some clues based on history.
– We’ve come just a little bit further up the river now,
and we’re looking at this other little enclosed space
where there is this thing here called an atlatl,
and so an atlatl is basically a spear thrower.
And apparently here, they used it
all the way from 13,000 up til about 2000 years ago.
So my understanding is that this must be
at least 2000 years old, and it could very well be older.
– [Narrator] Considering about half the Coso carvings
depict bighorn sheep, we can wonder
whether an atlatl was used to hunt them.
And there’s always more to explore.
– They’re finding new caves all the time.
There’s some I know,
that I’m not even allowed to talk about yet.
There are so many caves out there
just waiting to be discovered.
There are so many engravings
waiting to be discovered, and this is all over the world.
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