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(CNN)More than 12,000 years ago, South America teemed with an amazing array of Ice Age beasts — giant car-sized ground sloths, elephant herbivores, and a deer-like beast with an elongated snout.
These extinct giants are among the many animals immortalized in an 8-mile-long (13-kilometre-long) frieze of rock art in the Serrania de la Lindosa in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest — art created by some of the earliest humans living in the Amazon rainforest region, according to a new study.
“(The paintings) show the whole diversity of Amazonia. From turtles and fish to jaguars, monkeys and porcupines,” said study author Jose Iriarte, professor in the Department of Archeology at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Iriate calls the frieze, which would likely have been painted over centuries if not millennia, “the last voyage” as it depicts the arrival of humans in South America – the last region colonized by Homo sapiens when they spread from Africa, theirs Place of origin, around the world. These northern pioneers would have faced unfamiliar animals in an unfamiliar landscape.
“You encountered these large-bodied mammals and probably painted them. And while we don’t have the final say, 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” beneath the dazzlingly detailed paintings is controversial and controversial.
Other archaeologists say the paintings’ exceptional preservation points to 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 may actually be a capybara — a giant rodent now common across the region.
Last word?
While Iriarte admits the new study isn’t the final word in this debate, he’s confident they’ve found evidence of early human encounters with some of the vanished giants of the past.
The team identified five such animals in the publication: a giant ground sloth with massive claws, a gomphothere (an elephant-like creature with a domed head, flared ears, and a trunk), an extinct horse lineage with a thick neck, a camelid like a camel or llama, and a three-toed ungulate or hoofed mammal with a trunk.
He said they were known fossilized skeletons so paleontologists can reconstruct what they must have looked like. Iriarte and his colleagues were then able to identify their distinctive features in the paintings.
While the red pigments used to make the rock paintings have not yet been directly dated, Iriarte said that ocher fragments were found in layers of sediment during excavations of the ground beneath the painted vertical rock walls dated 12,600 years ago.
The hope is to directly date the red pigment used to paint the miles of rock. but dating rock art and cave paintings is notoriously difficult. Ocher, an inorganic mineral pigment that contains no carbon, cannot be dated using radiocarbon dating techniques. Archaeologists hope that the ancient artists mixed the ocher with some kind of binder that would allow them to get an accurate dating. The results of this investigation are expected later this year.
Further examination of the paintings could shed light on why these giant beasts became extinct. Iriarte said no bones of the extinct creatures have been found during archaeological digs in the immediate area – suggesting they may not have been a source of sustenance for the people who created the art.
The research was published Monday in the Royal Society B journal Philosophical Transactions.
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