These Ice Age drawings are more than 12,000 years old
A mastodon, giant sloths and huge horses… These are not the images from the new Ice Age movie but real drawings found on walls in the Columbian Amazon area.
British and Colombian archaeologists discovered a large display of ancient rock art. The rock art found in the Amazon rainforest carries images of the area’s earliest inhabitants living alongside giant Ice Age creatures. Though the discovery was made in 2017 and 2018, it has been made public only now via a television programme.
The paintings are estimated to have been made between 11,800 and 12,600 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age.
There are also paintings of geometric shapes, human figures, handprints and hunting scenes, as well as animals like snakes and birds. Also shown are an extinct camelid known as a palaeolama and a type of horse that lived in the region during the Ice Age. Researchers say the red paintings, made using pigments extracted from scraped ochre, make up one of the largest collections of rock art ever found in South America.
The artists’ choice of smooth rock walls sheltered from rain served as an ideal canvas for the detailed paintings. Some of the works are located so high up on the cliff walls that the researchers had to use drones to photograph them.
During the Ice Age, the Earth’s surface was completely frozen. This type of barren and cold biome is known as the tundra. Only a few plants, including the evergreen trees, could grow in the frozen soil. The main occupation of men during that period was hunting. Every part of the hunted animals was used for something or the other. Their flesh was used for eating, skins were used as clothing, blankets and shelters and bones were used for making tools and weapons.