'Winged Monster' Rock Art Finally Deciphered

livescience.com ^ | August 18, 2015 09:25am ET | Laura Geggel,

[BenLurkin]

The mystery surrounding the ancient rock paintings of Utah's Black Dragon Canyon has finally been solved. For decades, researchers and creationists have debated whether the vibrant red pictographs are images of humans and animals, or rather, depictions of a large winged monster, possibly a pterosaur.

Now, using cutting-edge technology, researchers suggest the red paintings show five separate images, including a tall bug-eyed person, a smaller person, a sheep, a dog and a serpentlike figure.

"It is not a single figure. It is not a pterodactyl," said co-lead researcher Paul Bahn, a freelance archaeologist. "It's a beautiful set of images."

The rock paintings belong to the agrarian Fremont culture (circa A.D. 1 to 1100). Other Fremont rock paintings — known as Barrier Canyon style — show abstract humanlike figures with elongated bodies and round heads, the researchers wrote in the study. These long figures are usually accompanied by tiny "attendants," including people, birds and four-legged creatures, such as hoofed animals, canines, felines, badgers and bears.

Amateurs discovered the painting in 1928, and soon after talk of the "winged monster" arose. In 1947, a man named John Simonson traced over the paintings with chalk and said the end result looked like "a weird bird."

Chalking rock art was a common practice in earlier years — ancient rock art is usually faint, and chalk can help make it visible — but today it's illegal, Bahn said.

"It's one of the worst things you can do, because it damages the art, it imposes what you think you can see on it, it messes up the chemistry of the rock, probably, and it just doesn't disappear,"

[wildbill]

Yeah, I get that— which is why your earlier comment about Pharaoh sizing in art and statues was so lame. :-) We’re talking about primitive cave art, right? Not art from a society that had developed exponentially from cave dwellers.

Somebody mentioned that similar cave art characters/images are found in other locations in other continents. Exactly. It almost looks like a ‘school’ of art/artists because of the similarity.

I suppose one could theorize that a ancient artist went all over the world, painting the same image on caves for the artistically challenged natives of the region.

Or this is simply the result of a common, coincidental state of evolution of art in similarly situated cave artists.