Thousands of rock art pictures depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.

The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain's University of Exeter.

The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.

Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, 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.

"These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.

"The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse in to the lives of these communities. It is unbelievable to us today to think they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some which were the size of a small car."

Description taken from the original article.

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