Some Rocky Art (EOTO 1)

There are two main forms of rock art: petroglyphs and pictographs. Rock art was created before the more modern sense of writing and was how people communicated. Petroglyphs are a type of ancient rock carvings. They are made through incising, pecking, carving, and abrading the surface of a rock. They are different from pictographs, in that a pictograph is a painting done on a wall. Petroglyphs are usually associated with prehistoric people and are found all over the world. However, my research mostly focused on North American petroglyphs. 

 

The oldest Petroglyphs in the U.S. were found in Nevada and date back 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. This is significant because there is very little leftover from the earliest settlers of North America. Petroglyphs are thought to mean a number of things. They could represent religious symbols, warnings, pre-writing, and even symbols for musical instruments. 

A strange phenomenon is that many nations across the world have similar petroglyphs. Researchers have many different theories as to why this is, ranging from migration patterns to the shared use of hallucinogenics among shamans. Overall, no one really knows why so many petroglyphs across the world are the same. It's one of the great mysteries of ancient humans, and always will be.