Pictographs on boulders found in northern Peru’s Shonquilpampa Valley that were painted up to 8,000 years ago

In northern Peru’s Shonquilpampa Valley, pictographs on boulders are offering a glimpse of Andean peoples’ changing relationship to wild camelid species such as guanaco, groups of which were domesticated sometime around 5,000 years ago and became llamas. The earliest images on the boulders were painted using red ocher around 8,000 years ago. They show humans armed with spears and bolas hunting fleeing camelids. The artists depicted hunters and prey to scale. “The art looks very figurative and realistic,” says archaeologist Victor Ponte of the environmental services firm Impact7G, who surveyed the site. “They depicted figures as they saw them in real time.”