Ice Age Rock Art Discovered Hidden In Amazon Rainforest
Ice age people painted these animals 12,600 years ago.
Transcript
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.
00:17 And it's filled with all kinds of South American Ice Age animals, some of which are now extinct,
00:22 including mastodons, giant sloths, and paleo-llamas.
00:25 Other images include human handprints, geometric
00:38 patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.
00:41 A study co-author Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said, "These
00:46 really 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.
01:06 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
01:26 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 government
01:54 and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.
01:56 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.
02:13 [Music]