Archaeologists Uncover Trove Of Ice Age Paintings In Colombian Amazon

7 min readDec 10, 2020

A team of British and Colombian archaeologists has made a spectacular discovery deep in the Amazon rainforest: tens of thousands of paintings strewn across nearly eight miles of cliff faces that date back to the last Ice Age.

The find is being described as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients” — a trove of ancient paintings made in red ochre that offer a glimpse of a lost civilization.

Mark Robinson, a research fellow in the department of archaeology at the University of Exeter, was one of the members of the expedition in Colombia. He says archaeologists descended from the Bogotá plateau into the Amazon forest’s thick vegetation to observe an outcrop of painted rocks depicting people dancing, laughing and hunting. Handprints and drawings of Ice Age megafauna also were sprawled on the rocks.

The expedition team knew rock art existed far into the tropical forest, but Robinson says social unrest in Colombia made the area inaccessible to researchers. Local Colombians had previously found some rock art in the region and did their own excavations years back, he says.

The archaeologists, along with a camera crew, decided to undergo the long trek and zero in on the large rock outcrops, he says, a place where no one had been before.

“We were hoping and praying that they would actually have some rock art on them,” he says. “And not only did they have rock art, they had spectacular rock art.”

Although the discovery was made in 2019, the Guardian reports it was kept under wraps as the team filmed for a series premiering this month called “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.”

Robinson says archeologists excavated the base of the rocks to find out when these paintings were drawn. Using radiocarbon dating and context from the images, such as drawings of now-extinct animals, the team determined inhabitants painted the rocks some 12,500 years ago.

The exciting part, besides the discovery itself, is now analyzing who these people were, he says, considering they were some of the very first humans to reach the Amazon at the end of the last Ice Age.

He says 12,000 years ago, humans were still coming out of the Ice Age and the Amazon forest wasn’t as full as it is today. People who migrated down through the Americas traversed a variety of landscapes, he says, meaning they were likely hunter-gatherers who lived off the land.

“But as they start to interact with this environment, they’re starting to build their own conceptions of the world, their cosmology, their gods, their religion, their social interactions and then their subsistence, as well as all interacting in one,” he says. “And then they choose to depict some of this on the walls of these rock shelters.”

He says these people were motivated by “the fundamental aspect of what humanity is” — expressing ourselves through culture. In their experience, it was through vivid rock paintings.

The sheer scale of this discovery means that it will likely take archaeologists years, maybe generations, to fully study it. Some of these paintings are painted so high up in the cliff that they can only be viewed using drones. Robinson says to access the art, researchers free climbed and used vines to swing onto higher platforms.

How did these ancient people paint up so high? Robinson says depictions of ladders and scaffolding may hold the answers.

“We assume that they were making some kind of construction using the forest products around there,” he says. “But what is interesting is the amount of effort they went into to actually get to these locations to put art on there — art we can’t even see from the ground.”

Archaeologists are hoping to dive deeper into why these Amazonian people used higher elevations for their art and who they meant the paintings to be for, he says.

Being a part of the historic discovery was a dream for Robinson. He says archaeologists like himself are “so used to looking at the dirt itself,” digging for micro remains, that it can be easy to forget the human aspects of archaeology.

“It’s hard for us sometimes to maintain that human element to our work,” he says. “To see something which is so closely related to the people — with depictions of people and how they interact — it really does bring the context of life for us.”

A vast expanse of Amazon rainforest seven times larger than Greater London was destroyed over the last year as deforestation surged to a 12-year high under Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Figures released by the Brazilian space institute, Inpe, on Monday showed at least 11,088 sq km of rainforest was razed between August 2019 and July this year — the highest figure since 2008.

Carlos Rittl, a Brazilian environmentalist who works at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, said the numbers were “humiliating, shameful and outrageous” — and a clear sign of the damage being done to the environment since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019.

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“This is an area a third the size of Belgium — gigantic areas of forest that are being lost simply because under Bolsonaro those who are doing the destroying feel no fear of being punished,” Rittl said.

“Bolsonaro’s great achievement when it comes to the environment has been this tragic destruction of forests which has turned Brazil into perhaps one of the greatest enemies of the global environment and into an international pariah too.”

Brazil’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, tried to put a positive spin on the bleak figures as he visited Inpe’s headquarters in the city of São José dos Campos on Monday. Mourão claimed the annual increase of 9.5% was less than half the anticipated figure of about 20%.

“We’re not here to commemorate any of this, because it’s nothing to commemorate. But it means that the efforts being launched [against Amazon deforestation] are starting to yield fruit,” Mourão claimed.

Environmentalists, who blame Bolsonaro’s deliberate weakening of enforcement efforts for the rise, scoffed at that reading. “This number is an outrage — it doesn’t tell us anything positive about the Bolsonaro administration at all. On the contrary, it shows that despite the [Covid-19] quarantine, environmental crime has increased,” Rittl said.

Mourão’s comment about the smaller-than-expected rise was “like saying that we were expecting 300,000 Covid deaths and we ‘only’ had 200,000,” Rittl added.

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Cristiane Mazzetti, a Greenpeace spokesperson for the Amazon, said: “This is an even worse number than 2019 and a direct reflection of the Bolsonaro administration’s anti-environmental policies which have weakened the monitoring agencies and used misguided strategies to fight deforestation, such as deploying the armed forces rather than environmental protection agents.”

“These numbers show us that we are continuing to move in the wrong direction than the one needed to deal with the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.”

The Observatório do Clima group said soaring destruction came as no surprise to those “following the dismantling of environmental policy that has been underway in Brazil since January 2019”.

“The numbers simply show that Jair Bolsonaro’s plan has worked. They are the result of a successful project to annihilate the ability of the Brazilian state and its monitoring agencies to care for our forests and fight crime in the Amazon,” it said in a statement.

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Mourão said the figures, which were produced with information from the Prodes satellite system, showed most of the devastation was occurring in four regions: Pará state, the north of Mato Grosso state, the south of Amazonas state and Rondônia.

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Pará, a longtime deforestation hotspot, was by far the worst-affected state accounting for almost 47% of the total deforestation.

“Thanks to Inpe’s work we now have a perfect sense of where we need to focus our actions in order to prevent illegal activities occurring,” Mourão told reporters, praising its “brilliant scientists” for their efforts.

But despite a growing “green” government propaganda campaign — which recently saw Mourão take foreign ambassadors on a tour of the Amazon region — environmentalists and foreign investors are skeptical about its efforts to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

During that three-day excursion ambassadors were not taken to any of the deforestation hotspots which Mourão detailed on Monday — and activists dismissed the visit as a “sham”.

In May thousands of Brazilian troops were sent to the Amazon supposedly to fight environmental crime, although some believe they are merely making things worse.

Rittl said one ray of light was the recent defeat of Bolsonaro’s key international ally, Donald Trump. “Without the backing of Trump in the US, the international pressure [on Bolsonaro over the environment] will increase and it will increase a lot,” he predicted.

Bolsonaro is one of only a tiny group of world leaders who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory and on Sunday claimed, without proof, that unnamed “sources” had convinced him the US election had been plagued with fraud.

Archaeologists Uncover Trove Of Ice Age Paintings In Colombian Amazon

Written by Radih