[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.

[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.