Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas

Hundreds of stencilled hands crowd the rock walls above the Río Pinturas canyon, sprayed in mineral pigment by hunter-gatherers whose painting tradition began some 13,000 years ago and endured until roughly 9,500 years before the present. Around them run lively hunting scenes and herds of guanaco, the animal that anchored survival in ancient Patagonia; the painters may have been ancestors of the peoples Europeans encountered here in the 19th century. Cueva de las Manos entered the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999.