Day 52

Day 52

Great Art is Timeless

13,0000 years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age, humans arrived at the Amazon Basin and made it home. They painted the cliff walls with beautiful art and because of that, now we can know them.

These prehistoric artists painted tens of thousands of images—including depictions of mastodons, giant sloths and other now-extinct animals. Their paintings are being heralded by researchers as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”.



Photo credit: José Iriarte, Michael J. Ziegler, Alan K. Outram, Mark Robinson, Patrick Roberts, Francisco J. Aceituno, Gaspar Morcote-Ríos and T. Michael Keesey: Ice Age megafauna rock art in the Colombian Amazon? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B377: 2022, pp. 20200496 (fig. 2), doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0496

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serrania\_de\_la\_Lindosa\_rock\_paintings\_-\_Iriarte\_et\_al\_2022.jpg

Iriarte et al., CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons



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