Stoned shamans, protective spirits and terrifying figures: the rock legacy of Serranía La Lindosa in Colombia

This 2024 is being a good year for the graffiti that we painted on rocks thousands of years ago. Rock art gives us information about prehistoric cultures (understanding this as prior to the appearance of writing) and is what has allowed us to know that the Sahara was not a desert 4,000 years ago or that penises have caught our attention since… always.

If we focus on Colombia, along the Orinoco River, we have found an impressive 42-meter engraving. Also a multitude of engravings in the Amazon area representing daily life thousands of years ago, as well as impossible figures, a glimpse of the spiritual world and some truly terrifying silhouettes.

La Lindosa Mountains. It is a mountain range located in the northwest part of Colombia and where more than 3,000 rock art motifs were found a few years ago. Among all the figures we can distinguish humans (some with three legs, something we already know what that means), animals, flora and hybrids, which we will talk about later. And, since 2018, a team of researchers has been studying these paintings, as well as talking to indigenous populations to learn about these motifs.

And one thing is clear: apart from the most scientific look, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the shamans to be able to unravel some of the figures, which date back more than 11,000 years.

Everyday life. Something that many cave paintings represent are scenes from the daily life of those who made them. Those of the La Lindosa Mountains They are no less and, thus, we can see images of fishing or hunting.

It is also possible to see silhouettes of animals and it is interesting that they are shown both statically (for example, an animal simply standing) and dynamically (an animal or group of animals running, either in a herd, chasing each other or fighting).

Spirituality. The Serranía de La Lindosa is a Protected Archaeological Area, a category that the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History granted to 893 hectares of the area, but more than for its historical value, it is crucial to maintain the paintings because they are of utmost importance for the groups indigenous people of the region. They are the guardians of the paintings – as the researchers also reflect in their study—but they are also safe thanks to the spirits. And the paintings of La Lindosa have an enormous spiritual charge.

That is why there are many representations of therianthropods, which are characters with both human and animal traits. We see representations of birds and humans, lizards with round heads like a human, a mix between a sloth bear and a human, a deer/human and other nondescript figures, but with penises.

¿Slender Man? Figures like the one above hide a multitude of elements that can be analyzed individually, but these mixtures between humans and animals have to do with the religious beliefs of those who made the paintings. Within many Amazonian groups we find the figure of the Master of the Animals, which is a kind of forest spirit that protects and controls the animals.

Hunting was also a pact with these spirits and shamans, who painted the animals before the hunts themselves, perhaps somewhat harmed by herbs and substances in ritualized trances. And one of those representations is exactly the one we leave above these lines. In it, we can see a human figure with exaggeratedly long arms that is very reminiscent of the famous creepypasta from Slender Man.

And the explanation may be much simpler than “he is a being from another world.” In the study, the researchers comment that indigenous informants say that shamans in an altered state of consciousness often described themselves as beings with elongated limbs, in addition to other somatic distortions. This is what would explain the extravagant dimensions.

work to be done. As there are so many panels full of art (as we said, there are thousands of images that adorn the rock), researchers continue to decipher drawings, but if there is one thing clear to them, it is that they have not yet been able to establish a chronology. In fact, in the study itself they state that attempts to date the images are still ongoing.

Images | MDPI

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