Ice Age Rock Art Discovered Hidden In Amazon Rainforest
Ice age people painted these animals 12,600 years ago.
Transcript
00:00Archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon have found a wondrous canvas of sorts filled with
00:05rock art from the last Ice Age.
00:07This canvas is an 8-mile or 13-kilometer-long expanse of rock painted with red ochre, a
00:13pigment frequently used in rock art across the ancient world, and it's filled with all
00:18kinds of South American Ice Age animals, some of which are now extinct, including mastodons,
00:24giant sloths, and paleo-llamas.
00:36Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.
00:41A study co-author Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said these really
00:47are incredible images produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia.
00:52It likely took indigenous people hundreds to thousands of years to paint these images,
00:57with the earliest dating to about 12,600 to 11,800 years ago, just as the last Ice Age
01:05was winding down.
01:07During this period, the Amazon was a patchwork of different landscapes, including savannas,
01:12thorny scrub, and forest.
01:15After the Ice Age ended and temperatures rose, the Amazon transformed into the tropical rainforest
01:20we know today.
01:22Researchers are calling the finding remarkable because these paintings show what ancient
01:27creatures looked like.
01:28There are other rock art drawings in the Amazon that depict wildlife, but those paintings
01:33are not as detailed.
01:35And besides finding the odd skeleton, it's hard to know exactly what these animals looked
01:40like because many went extinct as the last Ice Age ended, likely through a combination
01:46of human hunting and climate change.
01:49Scientists discovered the rock art after the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian
01:53government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.
01:57In 2017 and 2018, the researchers analyzed the paintings and excavated the rock shelters
02:02below them, where they found the remnants of Ice Age meals, including palm and tree
02:07fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, capybara, and armadillos.