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Miles Of Rock Art In Amazonia (Chiribiquete; Colombia)

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Nemo

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'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest

Tens of thousands of ice age paintings across a cliff face shed light on people and animals from 12,500 years ago

One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest.
Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.

Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study.
The discovery was made last year, but has been kept secret until now as it was filmed for a major Channel 4 series to be screened in December: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.
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(c) The Guardian. '20
 
Nemo said:
'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest

(c) The Guardian. '20
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What a fantastic discovery this is.

Also, those archaeologists are as 'ard as nails -

The site is so remote that, after a two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, a team of archaeologists and film-makers trekked on foot for around four hours.

They somehow avoided the region’s most dangerous inhabitants. “Caimans are everywhere, and we did keep our wits about us with snakes,” Al-Shamahi said, recalling an enormous bushmaster – “the deadliest snake in the Americas with an 80% mortality rate” – that blocked their jungle path. They had been delayed getting back, and it was already pitch black.

They had no choice but to walk past it, knowing that, if they were attacked, there was little chance of getting to a hospital. “You’re in the middle of nowhere,” she said. But it was “100%” worth it to see the paintings, she added.
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:eek:
 
Not sure, if this belongs here or Earth Mysteries. Pretty astounding.

One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest.

Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.

Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science...s-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest
 
And again, we find proof that the area was quite busy once.
 
As the Guardian article mentions:
The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found.
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This isn't the first Colombian site where extensive rock art arrays have been discovered. It does however, seem to be the most extensive rock art presentation site found to date.

In addition to the region's physical inaccessibility issues, the ongoing civil war (FARC, etc.) had essentially prevented researchers from exploring the area for several years.
 
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Kondoru said:
It looks like a huge comic book.
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I have enlarged a section and it's simply enthralling. I wonder what the abundance of 'wavy lines' represent.

Tell you what though, pretty sure I've seen a few of these symbols reproduced in crop circles... ;)

Screenshot_20201202_025225_resize_20.jpg
 
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EnolaGaia said:
This isn't the first Colombian site where extensive rock art arrays have been discovered.
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If there's perhaps a connection, I noted the following had striking similarities. It's simply a screenshot from alamy.com, as it contains the background information.

Incidentally, the previous image I posted is high resolution and can be enlarged for greater detail.

I could spent hours absorbed with this new rock artwork - an artefact of engaging splendour. :)

Screenshot_20201202_031155_resize_68.jpg
 
Xanatic* said:
I understand that caves are quite stable environments, so drawings can last a long time there. I am however surprised that drawings on an exposed rock face in a jungle can last so long.
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That was my first thought. It looks suspiciously pristine for what seems to be an exposed surface.
 
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I'm slightly perturbed by the fact that the contributor listed in the image on Comfortably Numb's post is named Porky Pies.
 
It's not an exposed surface - it's a rock shelter, which is a kind of half-cave, a deeply undercut area in a rock face, normally carved out by water along a river. During times of low water these are handier for human shelters than most caves, since the ventilation is good and there's less competition from large predators. In the absence of large cave systems like those in southern France and northern Iberia (we do have large cavern systems but they don't appear to have been used by humans until European immigrants started mining the entrances, which are almost universally bat caves, for guano), rock shelters offer the best preservation conditions for ochre painting, though it's obviously endangered any time there's massive flooding. Since streams and rivers adjust their courses constantly and elevations change over time (absent human engineering), it's not unusual to find shelters which are no longer in a flood plain. Art dating back 9,000 years or so has long been known from the Pecos River in the Southwestern US.

Wavy lines and zigzags are among the most common art elements in surviving art as far back as we have found it. An archeologist of my acquaintance likes to emphasize that these are also among the first images drawn by small children, and that while we can never really hope to know what these images meant to those who drew them, their primary meaning for us is our ancestors waving at us across the millennia, saying: "Hi. We were here, we were human, we were just like you."
 
The buzzword in archaeology back when I was at college was 'entoptics'. (I didn't study archaeology, but my missus did.)
Entoptic phenomena are the visual effects you get in your eye-brain system without any external visual stimulus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomena_(archaeology)
Experiences include geometric visual patterns such as dots, zagging lines, as well as grid patterns which are all common shapes which are universally understood by the human condition.[5] These patterns and shapes can be seen without aid of psychotropic substances but under their influence the heightened effects precipitate modes of altered consciousness. Entoptic experiences differ from hallucinations in that they are a purely visual phenomenon.
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bugmum said:
Ummm, anybody else notice that what are presumably humanoid figures don't have five fingers? o_O
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Neither do many humanoid cartoon characters. Stylization of natural forms is one of the first things we see once we start seeing representational art.
Interestingly, it is possible to have highly stylized art that is also highly realistic, as in European cave art. I don't really know anything about art (I don't even know what I like), but some things about it leap out if you look.
 
The claims that these Colombian rock art images depict ice age megafauna have spawned considerable debate. Some critics claim the rock art images aren't as old as enthusiastic fans suggest. Some claim the animals portrayed are more modern species. This newly published paper provides a response to some such criticisms. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Iriarte J, Ziegler MJ, Outram AK, Robinson M, Roberts P, Aceituno FJ, Morcote-Ríos G, Keesey TM. 2022
Ice Age megafauna rock art in the Colombian Amazon?
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377: 20200496.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0496

Abstract
Megafauna paintings have accompanied the earliest archaeological contexts across the continents, revealing a fundamental inter-relationship between early humans and megafauna during the global human expansion as unfamiliar landscapes were humanized and identities built into new territories. However, the identification of extinct megafauna from rock art is controversial. Here, we examine potential megafauna depictions in the rock art of Serranía de la Lindosa, Colombian Amazon, that includes a giant sloth, a gomphothere, a camelid, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks. We argue that they are Ice Age rock art based on the (i) naturalistic appearance and diagnostic morphological features of the animal images, (ii) late Pleistocene archaeological dates from La Lindosa confirming the contemporaneity of humans and megafauna, (iii) recovery of ochre pigments in late Pleistocene archaeological strata, (iv) the presence of most megafauna identified in the region during the late Pleistocene as attested by archaeological and palaeontological records, and (v) widespread depiction of extinct megafauna in rock art across the Americas. Our findings contribute to the emerging picture of considerable geographical and stylistic variation of geometric and figurative rock art from early human occupations across South America. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the early human history of tropical South America.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0496
 
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