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Thousands of drawings depicting giant ice age animals have been discovered in the Amazon rainforest, the paintings were likely made around 12,000 years ago, say experts from the University of Exeter in the UK who analyzed the find.
According to CNN, researchers in the Amazon rainforest have revealed thousands of depicting rock art images huge ice age creatures like mastodons, but also creatures like deer, bats and monkeys. The drawings were likely made around 11,800-112,600 years ago, according to British researchers from Abroad. The paintings are placed on three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, housing 12 panels and thousands of individual paintings.
Located in Serranía La Lindosa in modern day Colombia, rock art shows how the area’s oldest human inhabitants coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with giant sloths, mastodons and camelids, reports CNN.
“These are truly amazing images produced by the first people to live in the western Amazon,” said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.
“The paintings offer a vivid and captivating glimpse into the life of these communities. It is incredible for us today to believe that they lived among and hunted huge herbivores, some the size of a small car,” added the archaeologist.
More pictures show human figures, geometric shapes and hunting scenes, as well as other creatures such as deer, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes. The red paintings, made with pigments extracted from scraped ocher, make up one of the largest collections of rock art in South America, writes Mediafax. At the time the drawings were made, the Amazon was transforming from a conglomerate of savannas, rainforests, and thorny bushes into the broadleaf rainforest we know today.
The artists would use fire to exfoliate the rock and create flat surfaces to paint on, experts say. Although the paintings are exposed to the elements, they are protected by the rock, meaning they remain in better condition than other rock art found in the Amazon.
Some of them were painted so high on the rock that it “would have taken” special ladders made of forest resources to create them, according to British researchers.
The people who painted the images were hunter-gatherers who ate palm trees and fruit trees, as well as fishing in the nearby river for piranhas and alligators. Bones and plant debris also reveal that they ate snakes, frogs and rodents.
Project researchers are working to find out when people first settled in the Amazon region and how their presence affected biodiversity.
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