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Thousands of drawings depicting giant ice age animals were discovered in the Amazon rainforest, and the paintings were likely made about 12,000 years ago, say experts from the University of Exeter, UK, who analyzed the discovery.
According to CNN, researchers from the Amazon rainforest have revealed thousands of rock art images depicting huge ice age creatures like mastodons, but also creatures like deer, bats and monkeys. The drawings were probably made around 11,800-112,600 years ago, according to British researchers abroad. The paintings are placed in three different rock shelters, the largest, known as Cerro Azul, houses 12 panels and thousands of individual paintings.
Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern Colombia, the rock art shows how the oldest human inhabitants of the area coexisted with the megafauna of the ice age, with giant sloths, mastodons and camelids, reports CNN.
“These are really incredible images, produced by the first people to live in the western Amazon,” said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.
“The paintings offer a vivid and captivating look at the life of these communities. It is incredible for us today to believe that huge herbivores lived and hunted, some the size of a small car,” added the archaeologist.
Other pictures show human figures, geometric shapes and hunting scenes, as well as other creatures such as deer, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, snakes. The red paintings, made with pigments extracted from scraped ocher, make up one of the largest collections of rock art in South America, writes Mediafax. At the time the drawings were made, the Amazon was evolving from being a conglomeration of savannas, rainforest, and thorny shrubs to the broad-leaved rainforest we know today.
The artists allegedly used fire to exfoliate the rock and make flat surfaces to paint on, experts say. While the paintings are exposed to the elements, they are protected from the rock, which means that they remain in better condition than other rock art found in the Amazon.
Some of them were painted so high on the rock that special ladders made from forest resources “would have been needed” to create them, according to British researchers.
The people who painted the pictures were hunter-gatherers. who ate palms and tree fruits, in addition to fishing for piranhas and alligators in the nearby river. Bones and plant remains also reveal that they ate snakes, frogs, and rodents.
Project researchers are working to find out when humans first settled in the Amazon region and how their presence affected biodiversity.
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