‘Sistine Chapel of the Ancients’ - Ice Age Rock Art discovered in remote Amazon forest :

Ice Age Canvas - known as Sistine Chapel of the Ancients, painted 12,600 years ago discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest, a 8 miles stretch of cliff in Colombia  that is covered by tens of thousands of paintings created up to 12,600 years ago. It is one of the world's largest collections of prehistoric rock art.

Discovery of an 8-mile long mural appears in “Colonisation and early peopling of Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa.” According to the paper, indigenous people likely started painting the images at Serranía La Lindosa, on the northern edge of Colombian Amazon, about 12,600 years before present. It was discovered in 2019, but only announced in November 2020. It will appear in a Channel 4 documentary: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

Thousands of paintings include handprints, geometric designs, and a wide array of animals, from the small (deer, tapir, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, porcupines) to the large (camelids, horses, and three-toed hoofed mammals with trunks). Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes, and images of people interacting with plants, trees, and savannah creatures.

According to one of the paper’s authors, at the time the paintings were created, the Amazon was transforming from a patchwork landscape of savannas, thorny scrub, and forests into today’s leafy tropical rainforest. He added that many of South America’s large animals went extinct during this period, likely through a combination of human hunting and climate change.

“These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed, and fished,” study co-researcher José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said in the statement. “It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.”

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