Ice age people painted these animals 12,600 years ago.
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00:00Archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon have found a wondrous canvas of sorts filled with rock art from the last ice age.
00:07This canvas is an 8 mile or 13 kilometer long expanse of rock painted with red ochre,
00:13a pigment frequently used in rock art across the ancient world.
00:17And it's filled with all kinds of South American ice age animals,
00:21some of which are now extinct, including mastodons, giant sloths, and paleo llamas.
00:30Other images include human handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, and hunting scenes.
00:41As study co-author Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter said,
00:46these really are 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 was winding down.
01:06During this period, the Amazon was a patchwork of different landscapes, including savannas, thorny scrub, and forest.
01:14After the ice age ended and temperatures rose, the Amazon transformed into the tropical rainforest we know today.
01:21Researchers are calling the finding remarkable because these paintings show what ancient creatures look like.
01:28There are other rock art drawings in the Amazon that depict wildlife, but those paintings are not as detailed.
01:35And, besides finding the odd skeleton, it's hard to know exactly what these animals look like
01:41because many went extinct as the last ice age ended, likely through a combination of human hunting and climate change.
01:48Scientists discovered the rock art after the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group.
01:56In 2017 and 2018, the researchers analyzed the paintings and excavated the rock shelters below them,
02:03where they found the remnants of ice age meals, including palm and tree fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, capybara, and armadillos.
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02:19Find the creatures themselves in the 골�ou Prix
02:21If you've also walked into one direction, after the intersection of events this year, the tengan of course
02:25are the most important ones the most important ones.
02:27A reversed story of the same relationship, as the latercciones of the planet is the same, being the most important ones.
02:29We must pursue a number of the destinations of the sea, but also have the most important ones.
02:31From the lines of the extinction.
02:33It's behind us.
02:34It's behind us.
02:35It's behind us.
02:36It's behind us.
02:37It was a long time, and that's the worst question.
02:38It's behind us.
02:39It's behind us.