The paintings were made about 11,800-12,600 years ago, researchers at the University of Exeter in Britain said in a press release.
The paintings are set on three different rock shelters, the largest of which is known as the Cerro Azul, with 12 panels and thousands of individual paintings.
Located in modern-day Colombia’s Serania La Lindosa, rock art shows how the ancient human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with the Ice Age megafuna, with paintings showing giant sluggish, toasted ungulates with stoddons, clams, horses and three-beauties.
“These are truly incredible images, created by ancient peoples living in western Amazonia,” said Mark Robbins, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.
“Gives a vivid and attractive glimpse into the paintings The lives of these communities. Today it is unbelievable to us that he thinks he lived among, and hunts, giant vegetarians, the size of some small car. “
Other paintings depict human figures, geometric shapes and hunting scenes, as well as animals such as deer, tapirs, crocodiles, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes and curcupines.
Red paintings, made using pigments from scraped ocher, are one of the largest collections of rock art in South America.
At the time when the drawings were made, the Amazon was transforming the extensive leaves from savannahs, tropical forests and thorny shrubs into patchwork into the tropical forest we know today.
Experts say that the artists used fire to cut the rock and create flat surfaces on which the paint should be painted. When the paintings come in contact with the elements, they are protected by excessive rock, which means they are in better condition than other rock art found in the Amazon.
Some of them were so badly painted on the rock that they would require “special stairs made from forest resources,” the press release said.
The people who drew these pictures were hunter-gatherers who ate palm fruit and tree fruit, as well as fishing for piranhas and alligators in a nearby river. Bone and plant remains also revealed that they ate snakes, frogs, armadillos and rats, including pucca and kybara.
Researchers on the project are working to find out when humans first settled in the Amazon region, and how their presence has affected biodiversity.
The findings are the initial phase in a project that will run for five years, Exeter professor of archeology Jose Eriart told CNN.
One of the immediate objectives, he said, is to document all the rock art in the area and work out what other animals are depicted.
“These rock paintings are remarkable evidence of how humans reclaim land, and how they hunt, farm, and fish.”
“Perhaps this art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to socialize. The pictures show how people would have lived among the huge, now extinct animals they hunted.”
Erieart was impressed by the reality of the paintings, which were created during a rare window in which the early men lived with Megafaina.
“The level of observation of the fauna was incredible,” he said.
The findings are based on a new TV series on the UK’s Channel 4, “Jungle Mystery: The Lost Kingdoms of the Middle Ages”, and an article in the Quaternary International Journal describes the findings.
Robinson and Riart worked on the project in Madeleine, Universidad de Anticua in Colombia, and Gaspar Morcot-Rios in Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.
Local communities were aware of the rock paintings and researchers helped document them in the wake of the 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the FARCC guerrilla group, which was disarmed after 52 years of conflict. Researchers worked on the site in 2017 and 2018.
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