Originally published 2020-12-07.
The rock paintings of the Serranía de la Lindosa, in Colombia's Guaviare department, are one of the largest collections of ancient art in the Americas: tens of thousands of red ochre images spread along cliff faces about 13 km (8 miles) long, on the northern edge of the Amazon rainforest. They made headlines around the world in late 2020, when a British-Colombian research team led by archaeologist José Iriarte of the University of Exeter publicised them ahead of a television documentary. Some reports called them the "Sistine Chapel of the Ancients" and said they were 12,500 years old and had never been seen before.
The reality is more interesting, and a little more complicated. The paintings are genuinely spectacular, but they are not in a cave, they were known long before 2020, and their age is still being debated. Here is what the evidence shows.
What was found, and where
The art covers open rock walls and overhangs in a range of flat-topped hills, or tepuis, that rise out of the forest and savanna south of the town of San José del Guaviare. According to the Observer's November 2020 report, the newly studied panels lie near Chiribiquete National Park, a vast protected area that is itself famous for rock art. Lindosa is a separate range, not part of the park.
The scale is what stuns visitors. There are handprints, geometric patterns, human figures, plants and a huge variety of animals, layered over one another on walls that in places rise high above the ground. Iriarte told the Observer that recording everything would be a task for decades: "It's going to take generations to record them."
The research was funded by the European Research Council as part of a wider project on how the first people settled the Amazon.
Is the art really 12,500 years old?
This is the headline figure, and it needs care. Rock paintings made with mineral pigments like ochre are very hard to date directly. As the summary of the research on Serranía de la Lindosa explains, the murals themselves have not been directly dated.
The early dates come from excavations at the foot of the painted walls, where layers of sediment containing flakes of ochre were dated to roughly 12,600 years ago. That shows people were in the area, and were handling pigment, at the end of the last Ice Age. It does not prove that any particular image on the wall is that old. Paintings can be added, repainted and layered over thousands of years.
Some researchers argue that the paintings are too well preserved to be Ice Age art and could be far younger. One view even suggests that some of the art was made by Indigenous peoples within the last 500 years, after European contact. The honest summary: people lived here more than 12,000 years ago, some of the art may be very old, but the 12,500-year figure applies to the human presence, not to every painting.
Do the paintings show Ice Age animals?
Several early reports claimed the walls showed woolly mammoths. That was wrong. Mammoths never lived in South America. What the research team suggested, according to the Observer, was that some figures could be extinct South American megafauna: mastodons, palaeolamas (an extinct relative of camels and llamas), giant ground sloths and ice age horses.
Iriarte was confident about some of them. "The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you're looking at a horse," he said. The team later set out its case in a 2022 paper titled "Ice Age megafauna rock art in the Colombian Amazon?" in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The question mark in the title is telling.
Other specialists are not convinced. They point out that many of the animals could just as well be species still living in the region today, and that some "horses" might be domestic horses or cattle brought by Europeans, which would make those images only a few centuries old. Identifying an animal from a stylised outline is always partly interpretation.
What else appears on the walls
Beyond the animals, there are scenes of people dancing and holding hands, figures that seem to be climbing ladders or palm trees, plants that may include hallucinogens, and masked or composite figures. Iriarte has linked these to Amazonian beliefs in which animals and plants have souls and take part in ritual and shamanic life. The climbing figures may also hint at how painters reached the highest panels.
Was it really a new discovery?
Not in the way the headlines suggested. Rock art in the Serranía de la Lindosa was noted by the geographer Agustín Codazzi when he mapped the region in the 19th century. The botanist Richard Evans Schultes recorded it in 1943, and photographs were published from the 1980s onwards. Local communities and guides around sites such as Cerro Azul have known the paintings for generations, and Indigenous peoples of the region have their own relationships with them.
What was new in 2020 was systematic scientific study of particular panels, the excavations that produced the early dates, and a big international media campaign tied to the documentary. Calling the paintings "unseen by modern eyes" ignored the people who live there.
Why the area stayed so little studied
The main reason is not just thick forest. For decades, much of Guaviare was controlled by the FARC guerrilla movement, and armed conflict made scientific fieldwork dangerous or impossible. Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with the FARC opened the way for researchers to work in places that had been off limits for a generation.
The documentary's presenter, explorer and archaeologist Ella Al-Shamahi, made the point that big discoveries are still waiting in difficult places. Her blunt summary: "Exploration is not over." Her argument was that the remaining frontiers of archaeology are often in regions that are remote, disputed or recovering from conflict.
The documentary and the publicity
The site was filmed for the Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon, broadcast in the UK in December 2020. The Observer reported that the team had kept the findings quiet until then, partly because of the filming. Protecting fragile art from looting and careless visitors is also a real concern at popular rock art sites everywhere.
Al-Shamahi told the Observer that the newly studied site was so new to the scientific record that it had not yet been given a name.
Visiting and protecting the paintings
Some panels near San José del Guaviare, including Cerro Azul and Nuevo Tolima, can be visited with local guides, and community tourism has grown since the peace deal. Public access to many areas remains limited, and the art is vulnerable to touching, graffiti and erosion. Local guides say the original painters mixed tree saps into their ochre to help it last, a claim that has not been scientifically confirmed but shows how proudly the art is cared for locally.
If you go, the basic rules are simple: travel with an authorised local guide, never touch the paintings, stay on paths, and check current travel advice for the region before you set off. The Lindosa walls have survived centuries, possibly millennia. With care, they will keep their secrets for future researchers to uncover.
Sources: The Observer, November 2020 (reprint): rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest; Wikipedia: Serranía de la Lindosa. Research led by José Iriarte (University of Exeter) with Colombian colleagues; video as previously embedded on this page.
COMMENTS