Found in the rainforest
Those rock paintings in the Amazon:
Thousands of rock art pictures depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.
The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain’s University of Exeter.
The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.
Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks.
H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?
I found the linked article fascinating. As one who lived in the Amazon for a few years, I was aware of the presence of petroglyphs and pictographs in the area, such as those at Monte Alegre. That site, among others, made anthropologists rewrite the theory of human population of South America. This new site predates the Brazilian paintings, and because of its immense size and variety gives us a better look at what the environment was like at the time. I did not know that, at the time the pictographs were made the area was not heavily forested. It is fascinating to me that humanity’s presence in the area has seen the formation of the Amazon rainforest and only now seems to be causing its destruction.
Unfortunately, considering the way Brazil is treating the Amazon as a piggy bank, I fear that those petroglyphs will be destroyed. Who knows how many have already been destroyed in secret by the people destroying the Amazon rainforest.
Kristjan, most of the pictographs are in caves, where deforestation won’t affect them much, and also such sites pose a touristic possibility. I find it more plausible that people will make extra, fake petroglyphs and pictographs than that they will destroy the ones that have been found.
The Brazilian Amazon forest is being destroyed, especially under Bolsonaro, for the value of lumber, minerals, and grazing land. Destroying the pictographs provides none of those benefits.