[ad_1]
An 8-mile-long “canvas” filled with Ice Age drawings of mastodons, giant sloths and other extinct beasts has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.
The beautiful art, drawn with ocher – a red pigment often used as a paint in the ancient world – stretches nearly 13 kilometers of rock in the hills above three rock shelters in the Colombian Amazon, according to a new study.
“These are truly amazing images, produced by the first people to live in the western Amazon,” co-researcher Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who has analyzed rock art alongside Colombian scientists, he said in a statement.
Related: 10 extinct giants that once roamed North America
Indigenous people 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, about 12,600-11,800 years ago. During that time, “the Amazon was still transforming into the tropical forest we recognize today,” said Robinson. Rising temperatures changed the Amazon from a patchwork landscape of savannas, thorny scrub and forest to today’s leafy tropical rainforest.
The thousands of ice age paintings include handprints, geometric designs and a wide range of animals, from the “small” – like deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes and porcupines – to the “big ones”, including camelids, horses and tridactyl mammals with trunks. Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes and images of people interacting with plants, trees and creatures of the savannah. And, although 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 give a vivid and exciting glimpse into the life of these communities,” said Robinson. “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.”
Many of South America’s large animals went extinct at the end of the last ice age, likely due to a combination of human hunting and climate change, the researchers said.
Excavations within the rock shelters revealed that these camps were some of the first human-occupied sites in the Amazon. Paintings and encampments offer clues to the diets of these early hunter-gatherers; for example, bones and plant remains indicate that the menu included palm fruits and trees, piranha, alligators, snakes, frogs, rodents such as paca e capybara, is armadillosthe researchers said.
Scientists dug the rock shelters in 2017 and 2018, following the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and the FARC, a group of rebel guerrillas. After the peace agreement, researchers led 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 region’s biodiversity.
“These cave paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans rebuilt the earth and how they hunted, farmed and fished,” co-researcher José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said in the statement. “It is likely that art was an important part of the culture and a way for people to connect socially.”
The results were published in April in the journal Quaternary Internationaland the University of Exeter released a statement today (November 30) in conjunction 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 published in Live Science.
Source link
