Their prey has outlived them.
Some three thousand and four hundred years after the hunters disappeared, the guanacos and rheas that they once stalked and killed still roam the vast and relentlessly windy Argentine Patagonian plains. Their prey’s fortunes have certainly turned. Not only have their hunters vanished, modern humans designate them protected species and now guard them against any would-be hunter. Only the exceedingly rare puma now regards them as prey.
La Cueva de las Manos, or the Cave of Hands, looks out over a lush and narrow valley that the Rio Pinturas has carved through the terrain. Shielded from the unceasing Patagonian wind, trees grow along the river’s banks, where above them on the plains, only a few hardy grasses and low bushes stand strong against the restless air.
Between 9,300 and 1,300 years BCE, an unknown people regularly made camp here. Likely following the wanderings of their favored prey, they drank from the river and climbed the hillsides to the cave, under whose shelter they built fires and on whose walls they stamped the outlines of their hands and the tales of their hunts.
Nearly 80 kilometers of washboard dirt connect this dot on the map to Argentina’s fabled Ruta 40. The track cuts across the arid llanos, whose featureless surface draws eyes towards its distant horizon. To the west, two snowy peaks hint at the rocky spine of the Andes. The memory of the last fuel station in 230 kilometers recedes towards the north. To the east and to the south, there is only the knowledge that the land ends, yielding to the ocean’s hostile and alien world.
An archeological lab assistant named Natalia guides some twenty visitors along the site’s roughly 600 meters of decorated length. The group stops at each key site along the cliff and Natalia explains the paintings seen there. A one year old expresses profound delight at the texture of the rocky path and at the novel experience of upending her water bottle onto it. An old and wizened woman grips the chain link fence that separates her from the handprints and gazes at them for a moment after the rest of the group begins to move towards the next stop, a living ancient scrutinizing the work of the ancient dead.
Chain link fences separate visitors from the cave art. Site officials placed them to keep out vandals, like the one who made his own hand print upon the wall and underneath it scrawled his name. “___ was here,” his work proclaims in what was likely vanity but simultaneously seems a fluid continuation of the wall’s story. This lonely gesture implies what it does not say outright: “…and I will soon be gone”. They were also here, the Kilgore Trouts of prehistory. And they too, disappeared.
The sun climbs to its zenith, deepening the greens of trees and grasses in the valley below. For ten thousand years, humans have made camp here. For ten thousand years, we have left messages for those who follow us.
“We’ll never really know what the people who painted these images were trying to say,” says Natalia. “What did their handprints mean? What do the abstract images mean? We can piece together so much of their lives through archaeology, but we can never know what they were thinking.”
True enough, but when something as vast and unforgiving as the Patagonian llanos shows us just how small and fragile we are, perhaps we all think along the same lines. We are here. We are alive. Are we alone?
The car rattles over the rocky track, back towards the Ruta 40. Startled guanacos scatter from the roadside. Rheas dash in front of the car, careening madly across the expanse of their territory. Look out for pumas, warns a battered sign, optimistically assuming that enough are left to see. The llanos belong to the prey, not to the predators. In this desolate expanse, the meek have inherited the earth.
How to Get There
By Bus: The nearest town to the Cueva is Perito Moreno (not the glacier), at roughly 3.5 hours distant. Buses can be hired from here to El Calafate, with a roughly 45 minute stop at the cave on the way. Alternatively, many tour operators will include a stop at the cave.
Driving: Turn off of Ruta 40 at Provincial Route 97 and air down your tires. The road to the visitor center is a roughly 1hr drive from the highway, along a sometimes rough dirt road. Note: If driving, make sure to bring a spare tire, a puncture kit, extra water and preferably an air compressor. There is no cell service out here and you’re a long way from anywhere, in case of a breakdown.
Camping: Two estancias (farm houses) offer camping along the Ruta 40. One is called Casa Piedra and charged ARG$130 pesos as of March 2017. The other is Estancia La Criolla, which is formally a hunting lodge and a bit more upscale than Casa Piedra.