Sprawling 8-mile-long ‘canvas’ of ice age beasts discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest

6 min readDec 10, 2020

An 8-mile-long “canvas” filled with ice age drawings of mastodons, giant sloths and other extinct beasts has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.

The gorgeous art, drawn with ochre — a red pigment frequently used as paint in the ancient world — spans nearly 8 miles (13 kilometers) of rock on the hills above three rock shelters in the Colombian Amazon, a new study finds.

“These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia,” study co-researcher Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who analyzed the rock art alongside Colombian scientists, said in a statement.

Indigenous people likely started painting these images at the archaeological site of Serranía La Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, toward the end of the last ice age, about 12,600 to 11,800 years ago. During that time, “the Amazon was still transforming into the tropical forest we recognize today,” Robinson said. Rising temperatures changed the Amazon from a patchwork landscape of savannas, thorny scrub and forest into today’s leafy tropical rainforest.

The thousands of ice age paintings include both handprints, geometric designs and a wide array of animals, from the “small” — such as deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents and porcupines — to the “large,” including camelids, horses and three-toed hoofed mammals with trunks. Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes and images of people interacting with plants, trees and savannah creatures. And, although there is also ice age animal rock art in Central Brazil, the new findings are more detailed and shed light on what these now-extinct species looked like, the researchers said.

“The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse into the lives of these communities,” Robinson said. “It is unbelievable to us today to think they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some which were the size of a small car.”

Many of South America’s large animals went extinct at the end of the last ice age, likely through a combination of human hunting and climate change, the researchers said.

Excavations within the rock shelters revealed that these camps were some of the earliest human-occupied sites in the Amazon. The paintings and camps offer clues about these early hunter-gatherers’ diets; for instance, bone and plant remains indicate that the menu included palm and tree fruits, piranhas, alligators, snakes, frogs, rodents such as paca and capybara, and armadillos, the researchers said.

Scientists excavated the rock shelters in 2017 and 2018, following the 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group. After the peace agreement, researchers spearheaded a project known as LastJourney, which aimed to find out when people first settled the Amazon, and what impact their farming and hunting had on the biodiversity of the region.

“These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished,” study co-researcher José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said in the statement. “It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.”

The findings were published in April in the journal Quaternary International, and the University of Exeter released a statement today (Nov. 30) to coincide with a new TV documentary on the finding called “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon,” which will air in the U.K. in December.

Archaeologists Uncover Trove Of Ice Age Paintings In Colombian Amazon

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.

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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.”

Sprawling 8-mile-long ‘canvas’ of ice age beasts discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest

Archaeologists Uncover Trove Of Ice Age Paintings In Colombian Amazon

Written by Radih