Ice Age Rock Art Discovered Hidden In Amazon Rainforest

Ice age people painted these animals 12,600 years ago.

Transcript

00:00Archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon have found a wondrous canvas of sorts filled with rock art from the last ice age.

00:07This canvas is an 8 mile or 13 kilometer long expanse of rock painted with red ochre,

00:13a pigment frequently used in rock art across the ancient world.

00:17And it's filled with all kinds of South American ice age animals,

00:21some of which are now extinct, including mastodons, giant sloths, and paleo llamas.

00:30Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.

00:41As study co-author Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter said,

00:46these really are incredible images produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia.

00:52It likely took indigenous people hundreds to thousands of years to paint these images,

00:57with the earliest dating to about 12,600 to 11,800 years ago, just as the last ice age was winding down.

01:06During this period, the Amazon was a patchwork of different landscapes, including savannas, thorny scrub, and forest.

01:14After the ice age ended and temperatures rose, the Amazon transformed into the tropical rainforest we know today.

01:21Researchers are calling the finding remarkable because these paintings show what ancient creatures look like.

01:28There are other rock art drawings in the Amazon that depict wildlife, but those paintings are not as detailed.

01:35And, besides finding the odd skeleton, it's hard to know exactly what these animals look like

01:41because many went extinct as the last ice age ended, likely through a combination of human hunting and climate change.

01:48Scientists discovered the rock art after the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.

01:56In 2017 and 2018, the researchers analyzed the paintings and excavated the rock shelters below them,

02:03where they found the remnants of ice age meals, including palm and tree fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, capybara, and armadillos.

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