Rock paintings in rainforest

Jack Guy

Thousands of rock art pictures about huge Ice Age creatures 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.

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（大型野生動物群）.Other pictures show human figures,hunting scenes,as well as animals like deer,alligators,bats,monkeys and turtles.

“These really are incredible images,produced by the earliest people living in western Amazonia,”said Mark Robinson,an archaeologist at the University of Exeter.“The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse into the lives of these communities.It is unbelievable for us today to think they lived among,and hunted giant herbivores（食草動物）,some of which were the size of a small car.”

The red paintings make up one of the largest collections of rock art in South America.At the time when the drawings were made,Amazonia was changing from a mixture of savannahs（稀樹草原）,tropical forest and thorny（多刺的）scrub（灌木叢）into the broad-leaf tropical forest we know today.

“These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land,and how they hunted,farmed and fished,”said José Iriarte,a professor of archaeology at Exeter.“It is likely that art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.The pictures show how people would have lived among giant,now extinct animals,which they hunted.”

Iriarte was impressed by the realism of the paintings,in which early humans lived alongside megafauna.“The level of observation of the fauna was incredible,”he said.

Decide if each statement is true（T） or false（F）.

（ ）1.The rock art pictures reflect the life of the Stone Age in the Amazon rainforest.

（ ）2.Humans in Serranía La Lindosa lived together with Ice Age megafauna according to the rock art pictures.

（ ）3.Mark Robinson thought it unbelievable for ancient people in western Amazonia to coexist with giant herbivores.

（ ）4.José Iriarte is a professor of biology at the University of Exeter.

（ ）5.The rock art pictures were likely to be made in a realistic way according to José Iriarte.

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experiment plant

Amazonia is the largest river basin in the world,and the Amazon rainforest 1._______from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Andes Mountains in the west.Amazonia is thought to be more than 55 million years old!But most of the plant life didn't begin to flourish until after the most recent Ice Age.That means it didn't 2.______in the time of the dinosaurs who died out about 65 million years ago.

Best scientific assessments suggest that there are at least 40,000 plant 3.______,3,000 types of fish,1,300 bird species,430 mammals,and an incredible 2.5 million different kinds of 4.______living in the Amazon rainforest.The 40,000 different plant species 5.______in the Amazon rainforest basin,include hundreds of types of ferns and thousands of different species of flowering 6.______.