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Ice Age Beasts Found in Amazon Rainforest

Illustrations of some Ice Age Creatures, or mastodons, were recently discovered and analyzed by Archaeologist and Professor, José Iriarte, co-researcher Mark Robinson, and other Colombian scientists. These paintings were found in the Amazon Rainforest of Serranía La Lindosa, Colombia in sometime early 2020. Drawn with red pigment and spanning on almost 8 miles of rock; these paintings are presumed to be dating back 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain's University of Exeter. What these illustrations show us is that the earliest human natives of this area could have coexisted with ice age  Beasts – and we are talking about animals that were the size of a small car. There are thousands of pictures depicting some sort of giant sloths, camelids, mastodons, horses, three-toed ungulates with trunks, and hunting scenes, according to Jack Guy, a writer from CNN. “These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished,” Iriarte said in the CNN press release,. Its also amazing to see how art and culture, even thousands and thousands of years ago still play such an important and powerful role in the way we connect with other humans, socially. "These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter. It is truly amazing to think that these “beasts” had, at one point, lived among us humans.

The excavations, within the rock shelters demonstrated that these bases were some of the earliest human-occupied areas in the Amazon. These paintings not only tell us that humans walked and interacted among these ice age beasts, but they also tell us that these humans were most likely hunter-gatherers who ate plants, alligators, snakes, frogs, and other rodents, the researcher said.

This article depicts the first real information that we have from this region, which describes what these early hunter-gatherers’ (hunter-gatherer) adaptation was like and how they lived their daily lives. These findings helps us understand that there are still many, many lost cities that we still have yet to discover and learn from.

Lost cities are either those where all knowledge of the city's existence was forgotten before it was rediscovered or those whose memory was preserved in myth, legend, or historical records but whose location was lost or unrecognized.

The hunter-gatherers from 12,000-13,000 years ago, or so, had to undergo an extremely wide range of environments and temperatures over a very short time period, which was during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene transition – which ultimately shaped todays Amazonian biodiversity. . This art discovery is a piece of history that helps us modern day humans to explain some of the human colonization of the Amazon, which is one of the larger biomes of the Americas. It also contributes to understanding one significant chapter of the rainforest’s prehistory, which includes how humans of that time used colonization, landscapes, plant cultivation and domestication in their lives. The researchers also found that This could also be information that can potentially help us understand how they survived some of those harsh, wide-ranged climates. The research teams preliminary analysis indicates that the diet of the earliest settlers of the Colombian Amazon included tree and palm fruits, fish, and small to medium sized mammals. Another uncovering of the site suggests that roots were not as important as in other regions, which the lack of plant processing tools can tell you. .

Where did these Archaeologists start and what was their method you may ask. In 2017, a 40 foot excavation was opened at Cerro Azul to assess the archaeological history of the rock site where the illustrations were later found. This site contains the 8 mile stretch rock that was later discovered in 2020. The research analysts on the job site took carbon samples to access preliminary chronology of the hunter-gatherers occupation. With their findings, they found success.

Now the archaeology team at this particular site in the Amazon will be working on continuous findings for the next 5 years. José Iriarte, Professor of Archaeology at Exeter, told CNN that him and his teams goal is to work out what other animals are depicted on the rest of the rock illustrations – which stretches 8 miles long. Archaeological procedures, analytical innovations, and discoveries such as these are moving us to learn more about the when, how, and why people first colonized the Americas.