At the end of the last ice age, South America was inhabited by strange animals that have since gone extinct: giant sloths, elephant-like herbivores and an ancient lineage of horses.
A new study suggests we can see these extinct animals in enchanting ocher paintings made by ice-age humans on a rocky outcrop in the Colombian Amazon.
The indigenous people who inhabit the area have long been familiar with the stunning cave paintings at SerranÃa de la Lindosa, a site on the banks of the Guayabero River, but because of the Colombian civil war, they were virtually inaccessible to researchers.
Recent expeditions led by archaeologist José Iriarte, from the University of Exeter, in England, have reignited interest and discussions about the interpretation to be made of the animals in the paintings.
“All the biodiversity of the Amazon is painted there,” said Iriarte – aquatic and terrestrial animals and plants, as well as “animals that are very interesting and appear to be large mammals from the Ice Age.”
Iriarte and his colleagues are part of a project that studies the arrival of humans in South America. In a study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, they make the case that rock art depicts Ice Age megafauna. But, as the study itself acknowledges, the identification of extinct animals in rock art is controversial – and the La Lindosa site is no exception.
Ekkehart Malotki, professor emeritus of languages ​​at Northern Arizona University and author of research on petroglyphs depicting extinct megauna, described the research team’s claims in an email as “illusion”. For him, the interpretation that links the paintings to the Ice Age is the result of a purely visual interpretation that gives rise to hunches.
Archaeologists Fernando Urbina and Jorge Peña, from the National University of Colombia, also reject the hypothesis that the paintings date back to the Ice Age. They argued in 2016 that many scenes from La Lindosa may show animals introduced by Europeans so they were only a few centuries old.
Malotki also suggested that the exceptional state of preservation of the art painted on the rocks, despite being exposed to the sun, rain and winds, is an indication that its origin is not so distant.
Urbina said in an email that these disputes could be resolved later this year, when estimates on the age of the paintings will be refined.
One of the most evocative images in La Lindosa is of a stocky animal with a small cub on its back. Observing the figure’s idiosyncratic body and claws, Iriarte’s team believes these images represent a giant sloth with its young.
“This animal is extremely different from thousands of other paintings in terms of its prevalence and anatomical representation,” said Michael Ziegler, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and co-author of the new study, adding that the painting offers possible evidence of interactions between Ice Age megafauna and humans.
The researchers also identified other possible extinct species in the paintings, including animals related to elephants, camels, horses and bizarre ungulate mammals in the Litopterna family.
Where Iriarte’s team sees potential giant sloths and Pleistocene horses, Urbina and Peña see capybaras and modern horses. Malotki said the painting that Iriarte’s team believes is of possible elephant-related animals known as gomphotherids bears “absolutely no resemblance” to the extinct animals.
Iriarte and his colleagues counter these criticisms, pointing to archaeological and paleontological evidence that humans coexisted with some of these large Ice Age animals before they went extinct. They also note that ocher was found in sediments deposited at La Lindosa during the Ice Age, suggesting that the rock art may be from this period.
“We are very sure that they had been painting for a long time,” said Iriarte.
“The interpretation of rock art images can always be discussed, especially when it is argued that they represent extinct animals,” commented in an email, professor of archeology and anthropology Paul Tacon, from Griffith University in Australia.
“In this case, there are strong arguments, based on several lines of evidence, in favor of the idea that some surviving paintings in the Colombian Amazon are of late Pleistocene or early Holocene extinct megafuna,” he added. “The next challenge will be to date the paintings scientifically, to support or refute this hypothesis.”
If these efforts end up confirming the Ice Age origin, La Lindosa’s paintings may have captured a rare and fleeting glimpse of animals doomed to be forgotten, opening a strange window into the lost ecosystems of the past and the people who inhabited them. Even though the art is much more recent, it will help researchers understand the cultures that developed in this lush forest.
“In SerranÃa de la Lindosa, the people who made the paintings portrayed things that were important to them and that certainly should be associated with stories, the sharing of knowledge and aspects of domestic and spiritual life,” said Tacon.
Translation by Clara Allain
