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

00:05rock art from the last Ice Age.

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

00:13pigment frequently used in rock art across the ancient world, and it's filled with all

00:18kinds of South American Ice Age animals, some of which are now extinct, including mastodons,

00:24giant sloths, and paleo-llamas.

00:36Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.

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

00:47are 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

01:05was winding down.

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

01:12thorny scrub, and forest.

01:15After the Ice Age ended and temperatures rose, the Amazon transformed into the tropical rainforest

01:20we know today.

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

01:27creatures looked like.

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

01:33are not as detailed.

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

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

01:46of human hunting and climate change.

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

01:53government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.

01:57In 2017 and 2018, the researchers analyzed the paintings and excavated the rock shelters

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

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