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An 8-mile-long “web” filled with Ice Age drawings of behemoths, giant sloths and other extinct beasts has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.
Magnificent art, drawn with ocher – a red pigment frequently used as a paint in the ancient world – stretches nearly eight miles of rock on the hills above three rock shelters in the Colombian Amazon, according to a new study.
“These are truly incredible images, produced by the first inhabitants of the western Amazon,” studied co-researcher Mark Robinson, archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who analyzed rock art alongside Colombian scientists. , said in a press release.
Related: 10 extinct giants that once roamed North America
Indigenous peoples probably began painting these images at the archaeological site of Serranía La Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, towards the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,600 to 11,800 years ago. Meanwhile, “the Amazon was still transforming into the rainforest we recognize today,” Robinson said. Rising temperatures have taken the Amazon from a patchwork landscape of savannahs, thorny scrub and forests to today’s leafy tropical forest.
The thousands of Ice Age paintings include both handprints, geometric designs and a wide range of animals, from “small” – to deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes and porcupines – to “large”, including camels, horses and three-toed hoofed mammals with trunks. Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes, and images of people interacting with plants, trees, and savannah creatures. And, while there is also Ice Age animal rock art in central Brazil, the new findings are more detailed and shed light on what these now extinct species looked like, the researchers said.
“The paintings provide a vivid and exciting glimpse into the life of these communities,” said Robinson. “It’s amazing for us today to think that they lived among and hunted giant herbivores, some of which were the size of a small car.
Many of South America’s large animals became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, likely thanks to a combination of human hunting and climate change, the researchers said.
Excavations in rock shelters revealed that these camps were among the first human-occupied sites in the Amazon. The paintings and the camps offer clues to the diets of these early hunter-gatherers; for example, the remains of bones and plants indicate that the menu included palm and tree fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, rodents such as paca and Capybara, and armadillos, the researchers said.
Scientists searched the rock shelters in 2017 and 2018, following the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and the FARC, a rebel guerrilla group. After the peace agreement, researchers ran a project known as LastJourney, which aimed to find out when people first settled in the Amazon and what impact their farming and hunting had on the biodiversity of the region.
“These cave paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans rebuilt the earth, and how they hunted, cultivated and fished,” said study co-researcher José Iriarte, archaeologist at the University of Exeter. “It is likely that art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.”
The results were published in April in the journal Quaternary International, and the University of Exeter released a statement today (November 30) to coincide with a new television documentary on the discovery titled “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon”, which will air in the UK in December .
Originally posted on Live Science.
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