Ice Age paintings discovered in the Amazon 0:32
(CNN Style) ––
Thousands of rock art paintings depicting huge Ice Age creatures, such as mastodons, were uncovered by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.
The paintings were likely created around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain's University of Exeter.
READ: Half animals and half humans: the figures of the oldest cave painting that has been discovered
The paintings are located in three different rock shelters.
The largest, known as Cerro Azul, houses 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.
These pieces of rock art are located in the Serranía La Lindosa, in present-day Colombia.
The images show how the first human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with the megafauna of the Ice Age.
Precisely, they represent what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses, and trunked-toed ungulates.
The paintings were found in the Serranía La Lindosa, in Colombia.
(Credit: Professor José Iriarte)
Paintings in the Amazon «are incredible»
"These are really incredible images, produced by the first people to live in the western Amazon," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.
«The paintings give a vivid and exciting vision of the life of these communities.
It's amazing for us today to think that they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some the size of a small car, "he added.
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Other images show human figures, geometric shapes, and hunting scenes.
Also animals such as deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes and porcupines.
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The red paintings, made with pigments extracted from scraped ocher, make up one of the largest collections of rock art in South America.
At the time the drawings were made, the Amazon was changing from a mosaic of savannas, rainforests, and thorn scrub to the tropical broadleaf forests we know today.
A treasure covered by rocks
The artists would have used fire to exfoliate the rock and make flat surfaces on which to paint, experts say.
While the paintings are exposed to the elements, they are protected by protruding rocks.
Which means that they remain in better condition than other works of rock art found in the Amazon.
Some of the pieces 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 fruit and tree fruit.
They also fished for piranhas and alligators in the nearby river.
The bones and plant remains also reveal that they ate snakes, frogs, armadillos and rodents, including paca and capybara.
The project researchers are looking to find out when humans first settled in the Amazon region and how their presence affected biodiversity.
José Iriarte, a professor of archeology at Exeter, told CNN that the finds are an initial stage in a project that will last five years.
One of the immediate objectives is to document all the rock art in the area and find out what other animals are represented, he said.
The pre-Columbian rock art of Cerro Azul in the state of Guaviare, Colombia, dates back some 12,000 years.
(Credit: Marie-Claire Thomas / Wild Blue Media)
Images show "how people would have lived among giant animals, now extinct"
"These cave paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans rebuilt the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished," Iriarte said in the press release.
“Art was probably a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.
The images show how people would have lived among giant animals, now extinct, which they hunted.
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Iriarte was impressed by the realism of the paintings, which were made during a rare window in which the first humans lived alongside the megafauna.
"The level of observation of the fauna was incredible," he said.
The cave paintings appear in a new television series, "Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon", on Channel 4 in the UK.
And the findings were also described in an article in the journal Quaternary International.
Robinson and Iriarte worked on the project together with Javier Aceituno from the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia and Gaspar Morcote-Ríos from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá.
The communities in the area knew the cave paintings.
In that sense, they helped researchers document them after the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, which disarmed after 52 years of conflict.
Researchers worked on the site in 2017 and 2018.
Amazon Rock Art
