[ad_1]
The paintings were created around 11,800-112,600 years ago, according to a press release issued by researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK.
The paintings are spread over three different rocks, the largest of which, known as Cerro Azul, has 12 different panels and thousands of individual pictographs.
The rock art discovered in the area of the Serranía La Lindosa in Colombia shows that the prehistoric inhabitants of the region coexisted with the megafauna of the Ice Age, the paintings that represent what appear to be huge sloths, mastodons, camelids or horses.
“These are truly incredible images, produced by the people who lived earlier in the western Amazon,” says Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.
“The paintings offer a vivid and exciting little image of the life of these communities. It’s amazing for us to think today that they lived with huge game and herbivores, some of which were the size of a small car, ”he added.
Other paintings depict human figures, geometric shapes, and hunting scenes, as well as animals such as alligators, bats, monkeys, deer, tapirs, turtles, snakes, and porcupines.
The red paintings made with pigments extracted from ocher are one of the largest collections of rock art ever discovered in South America.
When they were made, the Amazon was transformed from a mixed area of savanna, tropical forests, and thorn bushes into the Amazon forest we know today.
Experts say that prehistoric artists exfoliated the rocks with fire to flatten the surfaces they were going to paint.
Although these paintings are exposed to the elements, they are protected from the rocks above, which has allowed the rock art of the Serranía La Lindosa to be preserved in a much better state than other examples discovered in the Amazon.
Some of the paintings were made at such high heights in the rocks that “special ladders built with forest resources would have been needed” to create them, according to the researchers’ press release.
The people who painted them were hunter-gatherers who fed on the fruits of palms and trees, as well as alligators and piranha fish that fished in nearby rivers.
The remains of bones and plants show that they also ate snakes, frogs, rodents and mammals.
“These cave paintings are a spectacular example of how people rebuilt the land, how they hunted, gathered and fished,” says José Iriarte, a professor of archeology at Exeter.
“It is likely that art was an important part of the culture and a way for people to connect socially. The paintings show how people lived among giants, now extinct animals, who hunted,” he added.
“The level of detail about the fauna was incredible,” said Iriarte.
Read also:
