12,000-Year-Old Rock Drawings of Ice Age Megafauna

[Robert Zwilling]

Discovered in Colombian Amazon 12,000-Year-Old Rock Drawings of Ice Age Megafauna
Extremely interesting pictures. I would like to see more about the pictures, the timing of their being drawn. Says it could have take hundreds or thousands of years to draw up the tens of thousands of pictures.

One picture with the cliff face filled from top to bottom, at least the way it was photographed shows row after row of pictures, very long rows and they seem to be pretty straight. I am guessing some kind of scaffolding to get the apparent alignment for so many pictures, but if it took hundreds of years, the scaffolding would have to be continually rebuilt, for that there should be post holes in the ground.

More likely, dirt was piled up against the cliff face, leveled off at the top, people filled up the space with pictures, then 3 feet of dirt was taken off the top, leveled again, then another round of picture drawing. That was repeated until they reached the bottom.

 

[tinkerdan]

Very interesting:
Although I don't see any picture that matches your description below.
The article mentions three rock shelters, so my guess would be that all portions of the rock wall were easily accessible to the people sheltering there.

One picture with the cliff face filled from top to bottom, at least the way it was photographed shows row after row of pictures, very long rows and they seem to be pretty straight. I am guessing some kind of scaffolding to get the apparent alignment for so many pictures, but if it took hundreds of years, the scaffolding would have to be continually rebuilt, for that there should be post holes in the ground.

I suppose being in sheltered areas would explain how they survived in an area you would expect a lot of erosion to wipe out the evidence.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

That one was in another picture.
Tall Rock Painting Mural
The pictures are located in a couple of areas in the rain forest. Local people knew about them but looks like they didn't get any professional attention until 2017, but were kept under wraps until now for a TV special. There was a fierce civil war in the area for the past 50 years that probably explains why no one checked them out.

The pictures have an unreal quality to them. They all seem the same technique, the same style. Supposedly there are more than 20,000 images. Either a lot of people using the same style or it took a long time. I suppose that the style could have been copied by everyone, but it just seems strange to me that there wouldn't be some kind of noticeable experiments with so many people or if done over a long period of time. There should have been at least one person marching to a different drum.

 

[tinkerdan]

Considering how long ago this was and the possibility of following an ice age and the theory that there might be hundreds of years between drawings it might be possible that the cliff was rising over time so that the people were offered a new palette every hundred years or so. I'm not real sure from the photo, but it does seem as though the images further above might be older and more faded.