Located in a remote canyon in Patagonia, Argentina, this cave contains over 800 hand stencils created between 7,300 BCE and 700 CE. The images were made by placing hands against the cave wall and blowing pigment around them, creating negative silhouettes. The stencils represent multiple generations of hunter-gatherer communities, with hands of various sizes including those of children. This site represents one of the earliest known examples of collective artistic expression in the Americas.

Over 9000 years ago, in a remote canyon in what is now Argentina, human beings pressed their hands to the rock and blew pigment from their mouths — leaving behind negative stencils, ghostly impressions of their own flesh. Hundreds of hands, layered over generations, stretch across the cave walls like a chorus of silent voices. Some are small — belonging to children — others are deliberate, overlapping, reaching. These were not marks of ownership or territory. They were a declaration: 'I was here. We were here.' In a time before writing, before metal, even before agriculture in many regions, these stencils speak with raw intimacy. They are not images of gods or animals, but of the self — made visible through absence. The hand, detached from the body, becomes a symbol: of identity, of continuity, of connection. To look at them is to feel another human being press their palm to stone and breathe. This is one of the oldest known acts of collective memory. A moment when art, ritual, and presence became one gesture.