NARRATOR: California's Death Valley is the hottest desert in North America!
But for one explorer it's a scientific playground that
hides the lost art of ancient people.
GENEVIEVE: So at the moment, I'm standing at a place called Fossil Falls.
This used to be a waterfall.
The Coso people lived right in this vicinity.
And so you can think of this sort of dried up waterfall as being their backyard.
And just like we do today, they decorated their backyard.
NARRATOR: Rock art like this can be over tens of thousands of years old!
The First People left rock carvings and cave paintings
all over Europe, Asia, and over time, the Americas.
Archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger has followed that trail all the way
to scorching California.
GENEVIEVE: Last time we checked it was 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
We're only two valleys over from Death Valley right here,
so this is pretty much as hot as it gets!
NARRATOR: It's rocky going, but worth the effort.
GENEVIEVE: This is basically like a big tube that goes from
surface level down into the falls.
We've only been here for about 15 minutes so far and, just in this one little area,
we've already found some new engravings, which is really exciting!
Even if we can only say, "It's a bighorn sheep," obviously it was meaningful to them.
They went through the effort of crawling in here to make it.
Not only did they engrave some really interesting images in here,
but there's also very cool acoustic properties.
So the way it sounds in here when I'm talking,
there's a really interesting echo going on.
(slapping).
So it's interesting to wonder if it's not just about the pictures,
but about the sound at the same time.
(slapping).
Getting to go hike around and explore, it's what I dreamed of when I was a little kid.
So it's pretty cool that I actually get to do it now that I'm a grown up.
NARRATOR: The older the art, the harder it is to find.
GENEVIEVE: I'm sure you're like, "How can you tell what this scratchy thing
on the rock is?"
Well, when you first scraped through the rock, it would have looked really white.
So kind of like this modern graffiti "K" over here, which you should never do!
Don't be defacing the rock panels.
We've got our modern "K" and you can see how white it is.
The fact that this one's starting to fade back towards the dark color tells us that
it's older.
If you think about it, these are like the great, great, great grandparents of emojis.
Simple little characters with huge amounts of information embedded into them.
But you need to be a part of the culture group to be able to decipher it.
You have to know the code.
NARRATOR: 10,000-year-old emojis.
And there's even more to explore!
GENEVIEVE: They're finding new caves all the time.
There's some that I know, that I'm not even allowed to talk about yet.
And, you know, that's the thing: there's only a few of us doing this,
and "we need more people" is really the bottom line!
There are so many caves out there just waiting to be discovered.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.