Cueva de las Manos

829 left hands and 31 right, because they sprayed with the other one

The Cueva de las Manos lies at the foot of a stepped cliff in the canyon of the Río Pinturas, in the upper basin of the Deseado River in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina, an isolated corner of Patagonia some 163 km south of the town of Perito Moreno. Its name means the Cave of the Hands, and the hands are everywhere: more than 2,000 stencilled outlines in and around the cave, red, purple, white, yellow and black, layered over one another in crowded collages on the rock wall that screens the entrance.

They were made by setting a hand against the rock and blowing paint around it through a bone pipe, using ground mineral pigments, iron oxides for red and purple, kaolin for white, natrojarosite for yellow and manganese oxide for black, mixed with some kind of binder. Of the hands, 829 are left and only 31 right, which suggests most of the painters held the spray pipe in their right hand and stencilled the other. Around the hands run guanacos, the wild relatives of the llama that still graze the region, and hunting scenes of people and animals in motion, including game drives in which hunters pushed guanacos into ravines.

The paintings were made in several waves over thousands of years. Pieces of bone pipe, radiocarbon dates and the layers of the floor, including a fallen fragment of painted wall, put the oldest at around 7300 BC and the last occupation at about AD 700, perhaps by ancestors of the Tehuelche people of Patagonia. In those early days the Pinturas and Deseado still drained to the Atlantic and watered herds of guanaco; as the ice fields melted, the Baker River captured the drainage, the rivers dwindled and the site was gradually abandoned. Hunters left projectile points, a bola stone, scrapers and fire pits among the bones of guanaco, puma, fox and birds. The Argentine archaeologist Carlos J. Gradin began the most important excavations here in 1964, part of a 30-year study of the area's rock art.

The very dry air, with no water seeping through stable rock, has kept most of the paintings in excellent condition, though graffiti, touching and the removal of painted fragments have done damage as tourism has grown. Argentina made the cave a National Historic Monument in 1993, and UNESCO listed it in 1999 as some of the finest surviving evidence of the earliest hunter-gatherers in South America. Three gravel roads reach it, the shortest 22 km with a 4 km walk at the end, and visitors must go with a guide.