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Report
Ice Age Rock Art Discovered Hidden In Amazon Rainforest
Live Science
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4/5/2025
Ice age people painted these animals 12,600 years ago.
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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, and it's filled with all
00:18
kinds of South American Ice Age animals, some of which are now extinct, including mastodons,
00:24
giant sloths, and paleo-llamas.
00:36
Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.
00:41
A study co-author Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said these really
00:47
are incredible images produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia.
00:52
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
01:27
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
01:53
government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.
01:57
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.
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