[seaknoll]

I've been here and to a few other, equally spectacular sites in this general part of Colombia. They're well-known among local people, but some are VERY hard to get to (freight or chartered plane to a community completely unattached to the rest of the country by road + hours-long boat journey + hours of hiking).

They can be quite sad though, e.g. the relatively newer images depict colonization encroaching upon the region - horses (introduced by the colonists), swords, and scenes that appear to show imprisonment of people.

[cardamomo]

The "relatively newer" images you refer to seem to be nearly 12,000 years newer than the images mentioned in this article. They're likely from a different culture entirely.

EDIT: Changed "older" to "newer."

[seaknoll]

The images are of various ages. This article describes the subset that are the oldest, but there are newer ones mixed in. In some places you get layers of them, where you can see that the older ones were drawn over. They can estimate how much later they were added based on the presence of animals and objects that did not exist there 12,000 years ago.

It's true that there's a huge gap in time between the earliest paintings and the newer ones and so some aspects of the culture probably did change. But the area has been continuously populated for millennia.

[olddustytrail]

You mean 12k years newer, not older.

[freedomben]

I'm not positive what GP meant either, but if they were talking about horses, that is mentioned in the article as being there about 12,000 years ago, which is significantly before colonization that first GP mentioned as having brought horses to the area:

> the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks.

[amatic]

Apparently, there were horses in the Americas, but they went extinct about 12k years ago, along with the other megafauna. What I understand is that different images could have been made in multiple time periods, from the first inhabitants up to today.

[mjan22640]

Younger Dryas caused megafauna extinction worldwide

[gort52467]

s/went extinct/were hunted to extinction by man

[atlantic]

Blaming megafauna extinction on humans aligns with current misanthropic fashions, but rapid global warming at the end of the last ice age is a far more likely culprit. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8

[mc32]

Horses are not extinct.

[cardamomo]

Yes, that's what I meant!

[Zamicol]

Horses are native to North America and became extinct after the introduction of humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse

[DanielVZ]

your comment makes it seem like colonists reintroduced a native species (idk if that was the intention, but that’s how it reads), when in reality the horse species that were once native in South America was quite different from European Horses.

It also makes it seem like their extinction was due to human action (again, idk if that was the intention), but it also could’ve been due to climate change.

[Zamicol]

The key part from below is "Quaternary extinction event of most of the Pleistocene megafauna that is widely believed to have been a result of human hunting pressure."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#Extinction

>Fossil evidence indicates that mastodons probably disappeared from North America about 10,500 years ago as part of the Quaternary extinction event of most of the Pleistocene megafauna that is widely believed to have been a result of human hunting pressure. The latest Paleo-Indians entered the Americas and expanded to relatively large numbers 13,000 years ago, and their hunting may have caused a gradual attrition of the mastodon population.

As far as megafauna and climate, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_woolly_mammoth#...

[gremlinsinc]

The Mormon church believes Tapirs are what were being called 'horses' and what pulled chariots and such, as an apologetic way of covering the fact horses weren't on the continent, but Joseph Smith never knew that.