Horsetalk.co.nz Remarkable depictions of ancient South American horses found in “Sistine Chapel of the ancients”
Professor José Iriarte with some of the cliff artworks in Colombia.
A treasure trove of 12,500-year-old rock art dubbed the Sistine Chapel of the ancients includes remarkably detailed portrayals of horses.
The recently discovered art in the Colombian Amazon provides crucial insights into early human colonisation in South America and how it shaped the continent’s diverse culture and environment.
The vast expanse of rock paintings in the forest were found in a mountain region called the Serranía de la Lindosa.
The paintings can be found in strategic locations across a 13km stretch of cliffs.
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