Ice Age Rock Art Discovered Hidden In Amazon Rainforest

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

Transcript

00:00 Archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon have found a wondrous canvas of sorts, filled with

00:05 rock art from the last ice age.

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

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

00:17 And it's filled with all kinds of South American Ice Age animals, some of which are now extinct,

00:23 including mastodons, giant sloths, and paleo-llamas.

00:25 Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.

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

00:47 really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia."

00:51 It likely took indigenous people hundreds to thousands of years to paint these images,

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

01:05 was winding down.

01:07 During this period, the Amazon was a patchwork of different landscapes, including savannas,

01:12 thorny scrub, and forest.

01:15 After the ice age ended and temperatures rose, the Amazon transformed into the tropical rainforest

01:20 we know today.

01:22 Researchers are calling the finding remarkable because these paintings show what ancient

01:26 creatures looked like.

01:28 There are other rock art drawings in the Amazon that depict wildlife, but those paintings

01:33 are not as detailed.

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

01:40 like because many went extinct as the last ice age ended, likely through a combination

01:46 of human hunting and climate change.

01:49 Scientists discovered the rock art after the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government

01:54 and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.

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

02:02 below them, where they found the remnants of ice age meals, including palm and tree

02:07 fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, capybara, and armadillos.

02:13 [Music]