Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon rainforest

The paintings were likely made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at the British University of Exeter.

The paintings are spread over three different rock shelters, the largest of which, known as Cerro Azul, houses 12 panels and thousands of individual pictograms.

Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern Colombia, the rock art shows how the region’s earliest human inhabitants are believed to have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with images showing what appear to be giant sloths, behemoths, camelids, horses and three toed ungulates with trunks.

“These are truly incredible images, produced by the original inhabitants of the Western Amazon,” said Mark Robinson, archaeologist at the University of Exeter.

“The paintings provide a vivid and exciting glimpse of the life of these communities. It is incredible for us today to think that they lived among and hunted giant herbivores, some of which were the size of a small car. “

Other images show human figures, geometric shapes, and hunting scenes, as well as animals such as deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes and pigs- epics.

The red paintings, made from pigments extracted from scraped ocher, constitute one of the largest collections of rock art in South America.

At the time the drawings were made, the Amazon was moving from a patchwork of savannahs, rainforests and thorny scrub to the broadleaf tropical forest we know today.

The artists would have used fire to exfoliate the rock and create flat surfaces on which to paint, experts say. Although the paintings are exposed to the elements, they are protected by overhanging rocks, which means they remain in better condition than other rock art found in the Amazon.

Some of them were painted so high on the rock that “special ladders made from forest resources would have been needed” to create them, according to the press release.

The people who painted the pictures were hunter-gatherers who ate palm fruits and trees, as well as piranhas and alligators fishing in the nearby river. Bones and plant remains also reveal that they ate snakes, frogs, armadillos and rodents, including paca and capybara.

Project researchers are trying to find out when humans first settled in the Amazon region and how their presence affected biodiversity.

José Iriarte, professor of archeology at Exeter, told CNN that the finds are a first step in a project that will last five years.

One of the immediate goals is to document all of the rock art in the area and determine what other animals are depicted, he said.

“These cave paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans rebuilt the earth, and how they hunted, farmed and fished,” Iriarte said in the press release.

“It is likely that art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially. The images show how people would have lived among giant, now extinct animals that they hunted.”

Iriarte was impressed with the realism of the paintings, which were done during a rare window in which early humans lived alongside megafauna.

“The level of wildlife viewing was incredible,” he said.

The cave paintings feature in a new television series, “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon”, on Channel 4 in the UK, and the findings are also described in an article in Quaternary International.

Robinson and Iriarte worked on the project alongside Javier Aceituno from the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia and Gaspar Morcote-Rios from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.

Communities in the region were familiar with the rock paintings and helped researchers document them following the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group, which disarmed after 52 years of conflict. Researchers worked on the site in 2017 and 2018.