New evidence of early Holocene naturalistic rock art in Jinsha River valley, southwestern China

Abstract

More than 70 rock painting sites have been discovered in the Jinsha River valley in northwestern Yunnan Province of southwestern China. These sites are dominated by naturalistic animal paintings and display certain similarities with the oldest hunting–gathering rock art discovered across the world. The Baiyunwan rock shelter is representative of the corpus of the Jinsha rock-art sites, comprising 15 identifiable naturalistic animal paintings in addition to several unidentifiable paintings. However, to date, the age estimation of these precious rock paintings lacks precision. Thus, this study performed U-series dating of carbonate samples (in total, 32 subsamples) to constrain the minimum and maximum ages of the Baiyunwan rock paintings. The U-series ages were corrected with a site-specific value of the initial 230Th/232Th ratio determined by isochron analyses, and the age reliability was evaluated by stratified dating analyses. Moreover, we used Bayesian age modeling to combine the individual age estimates and considered previously published data. The age range of the Baiyunwan rock paintings was determined as 7.09–8.93 ka, with a probability of 95 %. This age estimate corresponds to the late painting phase documented at Wanrendong Cave (∼8.37–8.70 ka), located within the same region, and provides new evidence for early Holocene naturalistic rock paintings in the Jinsha River valley, Yunnan, southwestern China.