Mystery of the giant snakes.depicted in ancient rock art

Archaeologists have discovered one of the world's largest collections of ancient art, showing giants and monsters walking the Earth. In a remote area of South America, a British-led research team has discovered more than a thousand prehistoric engravings - including the world's largest examples of prehistoric rock art.

- DAVID KEYS

However, the archaeologists believe that the examples found so far are only the “tip of a vast ancient artistic iceberg” – and that many more still await discovery.

It’s thought likely that the thousand-square-mile area (smaller than Dorset) may well contain around 10,000 ancient engravings. The largest discovered so far is a 43-metre-long engraving of a giant serpent. Others portray giant centipedes, larger-than-life animals – and immense 10-metre-tall human-like figures.

The engravings – discovered along the Colombia/Venezuela border – portray everything from stingrays and vultures to monkeys and crocodiles, from dogs and jaguars to turtles and frogs. There are also a large number of geometric engravings (mainly concentric circles, grid patterns and dot-filled triangles), representing as yet unidentified objects.

It’s one of the biggest concentrations of rock art in the world – rivalling others such as the French Dordogne region, Alpine northern Italy, Western Australia, and South Africa in terms of volume.

But by far the most unusual aspect of the engravings is the uniquely monumental nature of some of them. Around 60 of the 1,000 discovered so far have dimensions in excess of 10 metres. As well as the 43-metre serpent, they include two 10-metre-tall human-like figures (which could be spirits, or gods, or possibly shamans), an 11-metre-long centipede, and what is probably a four-metre-tall giant insect (potentially a butterfly).

“Our field research in Colombia and Venezuela is, for the very first time, revealing a previously largely unknown and unrecorded ancient culture in this remote part of South America,” said one of the project’s leaders, Dr Philip Riris of Bournemouth University’s department of archaeology and anthropology. “We hope that this will allow the modern world to appreciate the long-lost artistic and other achievements of the people who lived there many centuries before European colonisation,” he added.