There was a side gorge with open-air Adnyamathanha rock carvings or Yura malka by the Adnyamathanha people just past the western entrance to Mt Chambers Gorge. These rocks carvings (peroglyphs) were scratched grooves on rock surfaces on the gorge’s cliff faces and they consisted of simple geometric motifs or shapes (circles, concentric circles, lines). They have been interpreted by archaeologists as being part of the Panaramitee style or tradition, the core region of which lies in the geographical area between the Flinders Ranges and Broken Hill. These Yura malka are usually seen as both rock art and as archaeological relics of an ancient Australia: ie., as probably belonging to the late glacial Pleistocene or the early post-glacial Holocene (approx 10,000 years ago).
This was after the Ice Age which peaked around 20,000 years ago. Lakes had dried up, forests disappeared, deserts expanded, animals went extinct and vast swathes of the Australian land mass would have been simply uninhabitable ie., became too dry to live in. People contracted towards better-watered refuges around the coastline and in upland areas such as the Macdonell and Flinders Ranges in the interior. Sea levels fell more than 120 metres during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), exposing much of the continental shelf and connecting mainland Australia to Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. Then the weather warmed, the rains increased, the ice melted, the sea levels rose and Australia began to experience a a drier and more variable climate from around 5,000 years ago.

Some of the rock carvings were very weathered and worn and the circles had enclosed bars or lines within them. The rock of the gorge wall looked to be very hard. Was the rock metamorphosed quartzite? The petroglyphs are resistant to weathering processes especially on hard rock types in arid and semi-arid regions.
From what I can gather Leslie Maynard held that the older, non-figurative, geometric art was older than the figurative tradition (simple and complex). This interpretation looks at rock art through an evolutionary lens where simple motifs were used in the beginning, and they eventually became more complex. The Panaramitee style is best understood as a composite that includes Pleistocene components but also covers the entire Holocene; in fact petroglyphs of the non-figurative style were still produced in the 20th century.
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