The thousands of pictures are among the oldest depictions of people interacting with the huge creatures, including mastodons. Usually the only clues about their appearance are skeletal remains.
The thousands of pictures are among the oldest depictions of people interacting with the huge creatures, including mastodons. Usually the only clues about their appearance are skeletal remains.
This is one of the largest collections of rock art found in South America. The recorded drawings,likely first made around 12,600 and 11,800 years ago, are on three rock shelters on hills in the Colombian Amazon. The paintings, identified during landscape surveys, also depict geometric shapes, human figures, and handprints, as well as hunting scenes and people interacting with plants, trees and savannah animals. The vibrant red pictures were produced over a period of hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years. Some are so high, and inaccessible, special ladders crafted from forest resources would have been needed and they would have been obscured from view for anyone visiting the rock shelter.
There are drawings of deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, and porcupines, as well as what appears to be Ice Age megafauna. These now extinct animals are depicted in rock art in Central Brazil, but experts believe these drawings are more realistic. There are depictions of creatures resembling a giant sloth, mastodon, camelids, horses, and three-toe ungulates with trunks. These native animals all became extinct, probably because of a combination of climate change, the loss of their habitat and hunting by humans.
Read more: University of Exeter
