At the end of the last ice age, South America was home to giant ground sloths, elephant-like herbivores and an ancient line of horses. A new study suggests that we can see the lost creatures in the enchanting paintings made by ice age humans on a rocky outcrop.
Serrani a de la Lindosa, a site on the remote banks of the Guayabero River, was long known to the area's Indigenous people, but was virtually off limits to researchers because of the Civil War. Recent expeditions led by Iriarte have sparked renewed interest and heated debate over the interpretation of the animals in the paintings.
Dr. Iriarte said that both aquatic and land creatures and plants are very intriguing and appear to be ice age large mammals in the Amazon.
Dr. Iriarte and his colleagues defend the case that the rock art depicts ice age megafauna in a study that was published on Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
In an email, Ekkehart Malotki, a professor at Northern Arizona University who has published research about petroglyphs that depict extinct megafauna, called the team's claims "wishful thinking". The ice age interpretation is the result of an eyeballing approach that guesses at the nature of the paintings.
Archeologists at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia pushed back against an ice age origin for the paintings. In 2016 the team argued that many scenes at La Lindosa might depict animals that were introduced by Europeans. The preservation of the rock art, despite its exposure to the elements, hints at a younger origin according to Dr. Malotki.
When age estimates of the paintings are refined, these disputes could be solved.
One of the most evocative images at La Lindosa depicts a stocky animal with a small offspring. Dr. Iriarte's team believes the figures are of an adult giant ground sloth and its pup.
This animal is vastly different from the thousands of other paintings in regards to its prevalence and depiction.
The paintings show relatives of elephants, camels, horses and bizarre hoofed mammals from the Litopterna family.
Dr. Iriarte's team sees potential giant ground sloths and horses. Dr. Malotki said that the painting that Dr. Iriarte's team believed to be a depiction of elephant relatives, was absolutely no resemblance to the extinct animals.
Dr. Iriarte and his colleagues counter these criticisms by pointing to archaeological and paleontological evidence that humans coexisted with some of these ice age megafauna before they went extinct. They think that the rock art at La Lindosa could be from the end of the ice age.
Dr. Iriarte said they were pretty sure they were painting very early on.
The burden of proof is high for megafauna, which have been identified in rock art in other parts of the world.
The interpretation of rock art images is always subject to debate, especially when it is argued that extinct animals were depicted.
There is a strong argument using multiple lines of evidence to support the contention that some surviving paintings in the Colombian Amazon are of extinct megafauna.
The La Lindosa paintings may show a rare glimpse of animals doomed to oblivion, opening an eerie window into the lost ecology of the past and the people who inhabited them. It will help researchers understand cultures that thrived in this wilderness if the art is younger.
The people who made the paintings were depicting things important to them that would have been associated with stories, knowledge sharing and aspects of both domestic and spiritual life.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
