1 Remarkable images of ancient cave art have hit the headlines: rock paintings made in South America

around 12,000 years ago. The art, created on rock faces in the Serranía de la Lindosa, on the northern
edge of the Colombian Amazon, is a riot of ochre-coloured geometrical patterns, handprints, and images
of animals and humans. Until recent excavations, the works of art had been unknown to the international
community.
2 The people who made these works of art were, it is believed, among the earliest humans to occupy the
region, after migrations across what is now the Bering Strait some 25,000 years ago. Preliminary study of
the iconography of the art has led scholars to speculate that among the deer, tapirs, alligators, bats,
serpents, turtles and porcupines, long-extinct megafauna are also represented: mastodons, American ice-
age horses, giant sloths, camelids.
3 The 12,000-year-old print of human hands and the extraordinary depiction of long-extinct species is
incredibly moving. But the ongoing archaeological studies in this area also tell an important story about
the environment – and how humans have interacted with the precious Amazonian rainforests. The
archaeologists, a team led by Francisco Aceituno of the Universidad de Antioquia, Gaspar Morcote-Rios
of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and José Iriarte, of Exeter University, also discovered stone tools
and animal and plant remains, all of which add to the knowledge of the region – and raise many
questions, too.
4 The extinction of the megafauna presents an intriguing problem: was it caused by climate change, by
humans hunting them to extinction, or by a combination of factors? No megafauna bones were found at
the sites, so the people who painted the rock faces were either not big-game hunters or dealt with the
carcasses of large animals elsewhere.
5 What has been found, however, is evidence of many species of useful plants, including 10 species of
palm; the researchers think that these people may have been beginning to manage the forest – not just
adapting to it passively, but changing it. By around 4,000 years ago, communities in the forest were
fertilising soil, planting Brazil-nut trees and chocolate, and clearing land in a very limited way for crop
cultivation. These communities, much more populous than previously assumed, achieved food security
and were well-nourished – and their presence actively promoted the astonishing biodiversity of the
rainforest. Their direct successors are today’s indigenous populations whose existence is so cruelly
threatened. The glorious ancient cave paintings are not just a spectacle, they are the roots of a way of life
that human greed has done its best to destroy – but on which the ecological richness of the Amazonian
forest, and in turn all of humanity, depends.