Ice Age megafauna rock art in the Colombian Amazon?

Science × art: spotlighting unconventional collaborations

Science × art collaborations can effectively convey scientific insights to a wide audience. Throughout history, art has interpreted the natural world, offering vast, underexplored sources of biodiversity data. These artistic efforts also hold potential as valuable tools for understanding biodiversity.

Human dietary diversity in the Colombian Andes at the terminal Pleistocene-late Holocene sites Tequendama and Aguazuque

Understandings of spatiotemporal dispersals of Homo sapiens onto the neotropical South American landscape and their environmental interactions during the late Pleistocene to late Holocene are being refined by multidisciplinary archaeological research. The Sabana of Bogota region in Colombia hosts a concentration of occupational sites, including Tequendama (13,525-2,330 and possibly until 815 cal BP) and Aguazuque (5,900-2,750 cal BP), that offer a view into local human paleoecology. Here, we conduct radiocarbon and stable isotope analysis (δ 13C, δ 18O and δ 15N) of humans and fauna from these sites, and reveal significant interregional differences in dietary patterns through time. Specifically, individuals from Tequendama exhibit predominantly C3 diets, while individuals from Aguazuque show evidence of early C4 consumption, likely maize, around 4,400-4,200 cal BP. Stable carbon and oxygen isotope data suggest environmental stability, with periodic deviations in aridity levels within a mosaic landscape. Our study highlights the complexity of human-environment interactions in the region and contributes to a broader understanding of isotopic variability.

Tropical forests in the deep human past

Since Darwin, studies of human evolution have tended to give primacy to open 'savannah' environments as the ecological cradle of our lineage, with dense tropical forests cast as hostile, unfavourable frontiers. These perceptions continue to shape both the geographical context of fieldwork as well as dominant narratives concerning hominin evolution. This paradigm persists despite new, ground-breaking research highlighting the role of tropical forests in the human story. For example, novel research in Africa's rainforests has uncovered archaeological sites dating back into the Pleistocene; genetic studies have revealed very deep human roots in Central and West Africa and in the tropics of Asia and the Pacific; an unprecedented number of coexistent hominin species have now been documented, including Homo erectus, the 'Hobbit' (Homo floresiensis), Homo luzonensis, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens. Some of the earliest members of our own species to reach South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the tropical Americas have shown an unexpected rapidity in their adaptation to even some of the more 'extreme' tropical settings. This includes the early human manipulation of species and even habitats. This volume builds on these currently disparate threads and, for the first time, draws together a group of interdisciplinary, agenda-setting papers that firmly places a broader spectrum of tropical environments at the heart of the deep human past. This article is part of the theme issue 'Tropical forests in the deep human past'.