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At the end of the last ice age, South America was home to strange animals that have since disappeared: giant ground sloths, elephant-like herbivores, and an ancient horse lineage. A new study shows we can spot these lost creatures in fascinating ocher-colored paintings made by ice age humans on a rocky ledge in the Colombian Amazon.
These dazzling displays of rock art at Serranía de la Lindosa, a site on the remote banks of the Guayabero River, have long been known to the Indigenous people of the region, but were virtually forbidden to researchers due to the Colombian Civil War. Recent expeditions led by archaeologist José Iriarte at the University of Exeter in England have sparked renewed interest and heated debate in the interpretation of animals in paintings.
Dr. “The entire biodiversity of the Amazon is painted there,” said Iriarte, for both aquatic and terrestrial creatures and plants, and “animals that are very intriguing and look like large mammals of the ice age.”
Dr. Iriarte and colleagues, part of a project Studying human arrival in South America argues its case that rock art depicts ice age megafauna in a published study Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Ekkehart Malotki, professor of languages at Northern Arizona University, published research About the petroglyphs depicting extinct megafauna, he described the team’s claims as “wishful thinking” in an email. According to him, the ice age interpretation is the result of the “eyeball” approach, which predicts the nature of the paintings.
Archaeologists Fernando Urbina and Jorge Peña at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia have also argued against an ice age origin for the paintings. Set Discussed in 2016 He said that many scenes in La Lindosa could depict animals introduced by Europeans, which would set them back only a few centuries. Dr. Malotki also suggested that the extraordinary preservation of rock art, despite exposure to the elements, points to a younger origin.
Dr. Urbina said in an email that these disagreements could be resolved later this year by refining the pictures’ age estimates.
One of the most evocative images in La Lindosa depicts a stocky animal with a small child next to it. Dr. Iriarte’s team believe these figures represent an adult giant ground sloth and its cubs, drawing attention to its distinctive frame and claws.
“This animal is very different from thousands of other paintings in its prevalence and anatomical depiction,” said Michael Ziegler, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and co-author of the new study. that this picture offers potential evidence of interactions between ice age megafauna and humans.
The researchers also identified other possible extinct species in the pictures, including relatives of elephants, camels, horses, and bizarre hoofed mammals from the Litopterna family.
Dr. Where Iriarte’s team spotted potential giant sloths and Pleistocene horses, Dr. Urbina and Dr. Peña sees modern capybaras and horses. Dr. Malotki, Dr. He said the painting “definitely bears no resemblance” to extinct animals, which Iriarte’s team believes are possible relatives of elephants known as gomphotheres.
Dr. Iriarte and colleagues counter these criticisms, citing archaeological and paleontological evidence that humans coexisted before some of these Ice Age megafauna went extinct. They also note that ocher was found in sediments deposited at La Lindosa at the end of the ice age, suggesting that the rock art may have been that old.
Dr. “We’re pretty sure they were painting very early on,” Iriarte said.
Extinct megafauna has been previously described in rock art in other parts of the world, but the burden of proof is extremely high.
“The interpretation of stone paintings is always subject to debate, especially when it’s claimed to depict extinct animals,” Paul Tacon, professor of archeology and anthropology at Griffith University in Australia, said in an email.
“In this case, there is a strong argument using multiple pieces of evidence to support the claim that some of the surviving images in the Colombian Amazon are megafauna extinct from the late Pleistocene or early Holocene,” he added. “The next challenge is to date the paintings scientifically to support or refute this claim.”
If these efforts support the start of an ice age, La Lindosa paintings could capture a rare and fleeting glimpse of animals doomed to oblivion and provide an eerie window into the lost ecosystems of the past and the people who lived there. Even if the art is much younger, it will help researchers understand the cultures that thrive in this lush wilderness.
Dr. “At Serranìa de la Lindosa, the people who made the paintings were depicting things that were important to them and that could certainly be associated with stories, knowledge sharing, and aspects of both home and spiritual life,” Tacon said.
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