In the south of Piauí, 35km north of the small town of São Raimundo Nonato, the dramatic rocky landscape of the 1300-sq-km Parque Nacional da Serra da Capivara, a Unesco World Heritage site, contains more than 40,000 rock paintings – claimed to be the greatest concentration on the planet.
It has 800 archaeological sites and has yielded what’s considered the oldest evidence of human presence in the Americas, from at least 50,000 years ago. The dates put forward by researchers here were revolutionary in the archaeological world because they predated other ‘earliest’ finds by about 30,000 years, but they are now gaining increasing acceptance. The rock art is mostly 6000 to 12,000 years old, and includes depictions of deer and caimans, and people dancing, hunting and having sex.
