As the misinformation continues about a so-called ' 13 km long prehistoric fresco, which would be 15.000 years old, just discovered in Colombia, and showing humans with a missing megafauna, I recall that it is actually a set of sites spread out in a series of rock formations first reported by botanist Richard Schultes, who was sent to the Amazon in... April 1943 to search for hevea forests , and whose travel diary used Ciro Guerra to build the scenario of a magnificent film: El Abrazo of the Serpiente. It's then Alain Gheerbrant, best known today for his Dictionary of Symbols, who made known the rock paintings he spotted during the Orénoque-Amazon Expedition, title of his book published in... 1952. I illustrate this post with an excerpt from the documentation sent to me when UNESCO asked for my opinion on the ranking of this set in... 2017.
Bored by the announcement effects and toning articles that have recently multiplied around these paintings in fact carefully studied by Colombian specialists for the past sixty years, Guillermo Mu ñoz, who directs GIPRI (Grupo de Investigaci ón de Arte Rupestre -
https://www.facebook.com/gipri.colombia.7), sent the rock art research community the following statement:
Dear friends and colleagues.
This media outreach made La Lindosa's rock paintings very famous. I think they got what they wanted: create an expectation around their ′′ discoveries ′′ and of course the documentary they prepare and announce with an outrageous, exaggerated, imprecise and baseless title. We even got a call from APNews: they wanted to corroborate the information, and I think they weren't very happy with our answers, because we explained how the events really went.
In 2018, UNESCO listed the Natural and Cultural Park of Chiribiquete as a World Heritage List. The Colombian state is trying to keep this site away from tourists, and even researchers, because it is a nature reserve and it is also said that there are indigenous communities that have not yet had contact with the West and who do not want it. For these reasons, this area cannot be visited, and it has been decided to extend the protected area to Serran ía de La Lindosa, which is approximately 150 km away, and where a large number of rock paintings.
It is in La Lindosa Serran ía that we, Gipri Colombia, have been working since 2017 on systematic documentation, pigment study and preservation. We made the rigorous documentation of thirteen rock panels, with high quality photographic record, as well as geological studies of the area, archaeometric analyses of the paintings to identify the type of pigments used, their possible raw materials and manufacturing process ..... A diagnosis was also made on the state of conservation of rock paintings.
Indeed, there are many that have not yet been recorded and documented. Peasants in the region have found others, not just the one reported by the media! There are still many things to study, and this is done little by little, as it's still a conflict zone and the mountains can go more or less forty kilometres long. Yet even adding up all the lengths of adorned panels having been recorded so far, there are no twelve kilometres of wall paintings, as there are empty spaces, without rock paintings.
On the other hand, the representations in these murals show different types of anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, abstract figures and we, the Gipri Colombia group, still don't dare to make accurate interpretations of these patterns or scenes. However, some researchers see it as representations of the megauna (Morcote, Aceituno, Iriarte 2019, 2020), or dogs of war brought in during the Spanish conquest (Urbina, 2016), or llamas used in the trade in gold with Peru (Gheerbrant, 1948). The main thing is to be able to do a rigorous study of the whole, instead of trying to identify isolated figures. The truth is that there is no data, neither absolute nor relative, on these rock paintings, nor is it clear which ethnic groups made them. So there's still no timeline.
Finally, some of these murals were recorded in 1948 by Alain Gheerbrant, and news continues to be spotted. Since the investigations were carried out by Spanish speakers and reports and publications are in Spanish, it's like they didn't exist!
Europe continues to discover America.
