Ex-soldier dreams of Paralympic gold Having only one leg, at some point I got the nickname quarter chicken. And with the little bit of body that I still have, I guess that s really what I look like, says Juan Jose Florian, who has made self-deprecation his weapon of choice. Then when I started cycling, I thought we have heroes like Superman and Ironman, so why not Mochoman? A play on the fact that amputees in Colombia are referred to as mochas.
Colombia s fragile peace
Mochoman s story represents the stories of many Colombians. And anyone hoping to understand it must understand the history of the country. More than 200,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the 50-year conflict between government forces, right-wing paramilitary groups and leftist guerrillas. For decades, Colombia had more internally displaced citizens than any other country in the world.
Guaviare, a department of south-central Colombia, includes the north-western reaches of the Amazon rainforest. One of the most biodiverse regions in the world, this is also a contested landscape: the focus of competing interests, ranging from those of indigenous communities to those of wildlife conservationists. From the mid 1960s until recently, it was also a territory dominated by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a Marxist group that operated as a guerrilla organisation until a peace accord with the Colombian government was ratified in 2016.
During the 1990s, while the FARC dominated the region, Colombian researchers, led by Carlos Castaño-Uribe and others, were nonetheless able to identify tens of thousands of remarkable rock art paintings and engravings in what is now Colombia’s largest national park, Chiribiquete; it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2018. The ceasefire between the government and the FARC in 2016 allowed for more intensive inv
Spectacular eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon rainforest
Archaeologists discovered a collection of 12,000-year-old rock paintings in the Amazon that depict people living amongst mastodons and other giant animals.
Posted: Dec 13, 2020 9:51 AM
Updated: Dec 13, 2020 9:51 AM
Posted By: Jack Guy, CNN
Thousands of rock art pictures depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.
The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain s University of Exeter.
The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.