10/16/2026
🪨 Out on the dry bed of Winnemucca Lake, about 35 miles northeast of Reno, a handful of limestone boulders carry deep grooves, chains of diamond shapes, branching lines like the veins of a leaf, and clusters of small carved pits. There are no people, no animals and no handprints. Just patterns, cut deep.
In 2013, a team led by Larry Benson of the University of Colorado Boulder published a study in the Journal of Archaeological Science dating those carvings to at least 10,500 years ago and possibly as far back as 14,800 years. That made them the oldest petroglyphs ever dated in North America at the time. The key was the water. When the ancient lake stood high, the boulders sat underwater and nobody could have carved them, so the carvings had to come from the stretches when the lake dropped and the rock stood in open air. đź’§
The land belongs to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, who gave permission for the non invasive study, and one of the paper's co-authors came from the tribe's museum and visitor center in Nixon. Benson was open about the fact that nobody knows what the symbols mean. He also called them absolutely beautiful. 🌄
Someone stood at the edge of a vanished lake and cut these into stone at the very end of the Ice Age. What do you think they were trying to say?
Images used are for illustration, not historical photographs.
