Discovering prehistoric art is exciting at the best of times, but when that art consists of eight miles of Ice Age paintings, it becomes the discovery of a lifetime.
Researchers in the Amazon rainforest have discovered an unusual “painting” made up of drawings of mastodons, giant sloths and other extinct animals, dating back 12,600 years.
Ancient artists used red ochre pigment to create this massive artwork, which spans 13 kilometers (eight miles) of rock in the hills of the Colombian Amazon.
“These are truly incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia,” says University of Exeter archaeologist Mark Robinson, who published research on the historic discovery in The Lancet. International Quartet,He said in statement.
Robinson and his team believe that indigenous people began drawing these images at the archaeological site of Serrania La Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, toward the end of the last ice age.
These extraordinary paintings have been called the “Sistine Chapel of the Ancients.”(Marie Claire Thomas/Wild Blue Media)
During this period, which occurred between 12,600 and 11,800 years ago, “the Amazon was still transforming into the tropical forests we know today,” Robinson said.
Rising temperatures have changed the rainforest from a mixture of savanna, thorny shrubs and forests to today’s tropical landscape, Life SciencesNotes.
The amazingly preserved Ice Age paintings include handprints, geometric designs and a wide range of different animals, from crocodiles, bats, monkeys and turtles to three-toed hoofed mammals and trunks.
Other figures depict scenes of humans hunting or interacting with the surrounding nature, including a number of now-extinct species.
“These paintings provide a vivid and exciting insight into the lives of these communities,” Robinson said.
“It is inconceivable to us today to think that they lived among and hunted giant herbivores, some of which were the size of a small car.”
The researchers noted that many large animals in South America became extinct at the end of the last ice age, likely due to a combination of human hunting and climate change.
The paintings depict a wide range of creatures and scenes.(Professor Jose Iriarte)
Robinson and his colleagues excavated the rock shelters in 2017 and 2018, as part of a project known as LastJourney.
This initiative aims to discover when people first settled in the Amazon, and what impact their activities had on the region’s biodiversity.
“These rock paintings are stunning evidence of how humans rebuilt the Earth, how they hunted, farmed and fished,” study co-author and archaeologist José Iriarte said in the same statement. “Art was likely a powerful part of culture and a means of social communication between people.”
a Channel 4 A documentary about this discovery, called “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the AmazonThe series aired in the UK in December 2020.
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