More than 12,000 years ago, South America was teeming with an astonishing array of Ice Age animals — giant car-sized sloths, massive herbivores and a deer-like animal with an elongated snout.
These extinct giants are among the many animals immortalized in an 13-kilometer frieze of cave paintings in Serranía de la Lindosa, in the Colombian Amazon rainforest — art created by some of the first humans to live in the region, according to a new study.
“(The paintings) have all the diversity of the Amazon. From turtles and fish to jaguars, monkeys and porcupines,” said study author José Iriarte, a professor in the Department of Archeology at the University of Exeter, UK.
Iriate calls the frieze, which would likely have been painted over centuries if not millennia, “the last journey,” as he said it represents the arrival of humans to South America – the last region to be colonized by Homo sapiens as that spread around the world from Africa, their place of origin. These northern pioneers would have faced unknown animals in an unknown field.
“They found these large mammals and probably painted them. And although we don’t have the last word, these paintings are very naturalistic and we can see morphological features of the animals,” he said.
But the discovery of what scientists call “extinct megafauna” among the incredibly detailed paintings is controversial and contested.
Other archaeologists say the paintings’ exceptional preservation suggests a much more recent origin and that there are other plausible candidates for the creatures depicted. For example, the giant sloth identified by Iriarte and his colleagues could actually be a capybara – a giant rodent common throughout the region today.
While Iriarte admits the new study isn’t the final word on this debate, he’s confident they’ve found evidence of early humans who came across some of the missing giants of the past.
The team identified five such animals in the publication: a giant sloth with massive claws, a gomphothere (an elephant-like creature with a domed head, wide ears and a trunk), an extinct lineage of horse with a thick neck, a camel-like camel or llama, and a three-toed ungulate, or hoofed mammal, with a proboscis.
Iriarte said they are well known from fossilized skeletons, allowing paleontologists to reconstruct their appearance. Iriarte and his colleagues were then able to identify the defining features in the paintings.
While the red pigments used to make the rock art have yet to be directly dated, Iriarte said ocher fragments found in layers of sediment during excavations of the ground beneath the painted vertical faces of the rock date back to 12,600 years ago.
The hope is to directly date the red pigment used to paint the miles of rock, but dating cave paintings is notoriously tricky. Ocher, an inorganic mineral pigment that does not contain carbon, cannot be dated using radiocarbon dating techniques. Archaeologists hope that ancient artists mixed the ocher with some sort of binding agent that will allow them to get an accurate date. The results of this investigation are expected later this year.
Further study of the paintings could shed light on why these giant animals went extinct. Iriarte said that no bones of the extinct creatures were found during archaeological excavations in the immediate area – suggesting that perhaps they were not a food source for the people who created the art.
The research was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on Monday (7).
Source: CNN Brasil
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