Suzanne's Mom's Blog

There are always new things to discover. We’ll never stop needing scientists to discover treatments and cures for emerging illnesses or new kinds of energy to replace fossil fuels. We’ll never stop needing diplomats and non-diplomats to discover ways to make peace or artists to lead us to new frontiers of imagination.

And what about archaeologists? New discoveries of ancient artifacts continue to teach us so much about both our history and our future.

Hakim Bishara writes at Hyperallergic, “In a remarkable discovery, archaeologists have found one of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art in the Amazonian rainforest. Tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans, made up to 12,600 years ago, were found on an eight-mile rock surface along the Guayabero River in the Colombian Amazon.

“Called ‘the Sistine Chapel of the ancients,’ the collection includes drawings of large mammals, birds, fish, lizards, handprints, and masked figures of dancing humans. The ancient paintings also record interactions between humans and extinct species of giant Ice Age mammals like mastodons.

“The discovery belongs to a joint team of Colombian-British researchers, led by Jose Iriarte, a professor of archaeology at Exeter University in the United Kingdom. The archeologists conducted the main bulk of excavations in the area between 2017-2018 with the intent of revealing their findings in the [British] documentary series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon. … The documentary’s presenter is Ella Al-Shamahi, an archaeologist and explorer. The findings are also outlined in an article in the journal Quaternary International.

“In an email to Hyperallergic, the researchers wrote: ‘The excavations, in the deep soil around the shelters, have revealed one of the earliest secure dates for the occupation of the Colombian Amazon and clues about people’s diet at this time, as well as the remains of small tools and scraped ochre used to extract pigments to make the paintings.’

“The team has also found realistic drawings of deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, and porcupines. There are also depictions of creatures resembling a giant sloth, camelids, horses, and three-toe ungulates with trunks.

‘These native animals all became extinct, probably because of a combination of climate change, the loss of their habitat and hunting by humans,’ the researchers wrote.

“According to the researchers, communities that lived in the area at the time of the drawings were hunter-gatherers who fished in the nearby river. Remains of bones and plants found during the excavations shed information about their diets, which included palm and tree fruits, piranha, alligators, snakes, frogs, rodents such as paca, capybara, and armadillos. …

“The archaeologists wrote, ‘At the time the drawings were made temperatures were rising, starting the transformation of the area from a mosaic landscape of patchy savannahs, thorny scrub, gallery forests and tropical forest with montane elements into the broadleaf tropical Amazon forest of today.’ “

More pictures at Hyperallergic, here. That list of animals is reminding me of Suzanne at age 5, when she was a huge fan of the capybara. We saw a few at Disney World that year.