Tens of Thousands of 12,000-Year-Old Rock Paintings Found in Colombia

Toward the end of the last Ice Age, prehistoric artists painted tens of thousands of images—including depictions of mastodons, giant sloths and other now-extinct animals—on cliff walls in the Amazon rainforest, reports Dalya Alberge for the Guardian. Archaeologists found the first of the enormous set of images in 2017 but kept the trove secret while continuing work and preparing a television series on the discovery.

A crew of filmmakers discovered beautiful paintings that may be thousands of years old on rock walls in a remote part of the Colombian jungle in 2015. The region is almost inaccessible to modern people and remains unexplored except by the natives who are believed to still live there.

The Guardian reports that the crew, headed by director Mike Slee, took photos and video of the paintings from a helicopter. They have been described as ‘masterpieces’ and depict a holy man, hunters and different animals species.

“They reveal the hand of a master of painting,” Fernando Urbina, a rock-art specialist with the National University of Colombia, told the Guardian.