Ancient Cliff Paintings in the Amazon

Ancient paintings on rock walls feature human figures and animals of today’s rainforest, like deer, tapirs, and jaguars. But they also appear to show animals that went extinct thousands of years ago.

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[anne-droid]

Heartbreakingly beautiful and incredibly important. This is what is loveliest about science.

[storm]

Artwork from thousands of years ago - mesmerizing!

[starjunkie]

Being Ecuadorian, anything within the Amazon basin is absolutely stunning! Nowhere else like it on Earth...but be very, very careful out there.

[zeideerskine]

The paintings also include counters and different types of net weaves. That means we are dealing with writing not just some doodles. Moreover, two plus miles of such writing over thousands of years means this is the world's oldest history book.

[balamsky]

Fascinating paintings! I was captivated by the one at 00:20. If you look closely, it is a sad scene indeed. If you start from the bottom left, you can clearly see three people raising their hands and a smaller one. There is also something like a bird and a couple of monkeys. (Many uncontacted tribes in the Amazon today also keep them as pets in their villages.) Behind the people is something like their hut.

If you move more to the center of the scene, you see bars, like woven ones, some stakes or things that look like mini fences (like the ones used to dry cassava). All the patterns are very beautiful. But then comes the most important thing: the person in the middle who raises his hands and who seems to be running, if you look at his feet, towards a huge snake (of those that must be abundant in the Amazon), which is painted on a blurrier image of a person who seems to be lying on the ground, as if he were stepping over it. The saddest thing is that it seems that the snake is heading for a small human on its left.

So, looking back, we could perhaps interpret a tragic moment that occurred in the village, the loss of two members, which, for such small communities, must always have been a very hard blow. There is also the hysteria of the person running and the anguish, perhaps, that the rest of the people have not yet realized what is happening. If so, it would mean that the rest of the things and objects we see could be representations of objects from their daily life and, together, a kind of painting of a scene.

But I don't know, I'm not an archaeologist. You would have to ask them. If only this kind of objects could be protected and their date dated accurately... there would be generations who could interpret their meaning.

[Ashley_Schaeffer]

Is no-one going to mention the depiction of double-helix structures...

[SunnyIlha]

They did drawings of Megatherium. They lived beside it.

Over 12, 900 years ago.
They were already there.

Which means they were there another 3-4 thousand years BEFORE this Time of the art work.

It means People were there *17, 000* years ago.

[nativemega-art]

This is absolutely incredible art!! Holy smoke!!

[philthycat]

Great how they got paint to last so long. I’ve to paint my shed every year.

[Existinginthespace]

Ancient history is fascinating!
I recently saw a video on a pre-dynastic (about 5000-7000 years ago) Egyptian vase made of granite who's machining tolerance is within a few widths of a human hair.
It really makes you wonder.

[PedroFerreira-zeyp]

These people coinhabited the forest along with mega fauna. Can you imagine the size of the anacondas they encountered on a daily basis!? If they are ginormous today, imagine back then!

[originsdecoded]

This paintings are diagrams for energy work manipulation of the land via geoglyph structures to harness the power of the weather.

[Boomshankarim]

These paintings mostly show hunting scenes, you can clearly see men with spears attacking all types of animals: mammals, reptiles, fish and birds. You can also see them celebrating the kill in groups holding hands and dancing together. It seems, like in Europe, most of the animals disappeared when the humans appeared, leading to the only explanation that they were hunted down to extinction by humans. We might think of these ancient people as more connected with nature, but it looks to me they took full advantage of it, just like we do today. We are all the same humans after all.

[SuperSayantan]

amazon- the land of ancient things like the giant sloth, mastodon, jeff bezos’ hair.

[kellydalstok]

Since prehistoric rock art is found all around the globe, it makes me wonder if humans started painting these before they left Africa.
I’m not sure if the size of an animal in relation to the human figures says all that much about its relative size though. Young children don’t draw to scale; the size of figures is usually an indicator of their importance to the child.

[dustin]

What happened to the ancient American horse?

Did they go extinct after the cataclysm? And were they brought over from Europe, Asia and or Africa in the first place way before recorded history and that's why they never really took hold here bc they were never a native species? There's lots of circumstantial evidence for transatlantic trade (like nicotine found in ancient Egyptian mummies and the pyramids being built all over the world.) There's a lot from our past we just don't know yet.

[oo-hkzd]

I believe the videos of the genius who tied them to the star constellations got taken down.
I miss the old YouTube I thought I had them saved. 😢I miss the gentlemens videos knowledge and time effort hard work.
Whoever it was that did the hard work I miss.

[psycherevival]

The illustrations include the double helix of DNA and cell division.

[markthompson]

Photograph every square inch upload it online to be studied

[bosquenautas]

Or maybe they weren't the first ice age Amazonians, who's to say people hadn't been thete much, much longer