2,000-year-old stone faces and engravings emerge amid severe drought in Amazon

Ancient human faces believed to have been carved into rock up to 2,000 years ago have been revealed in the Amazon. The previously hidden petroglyphs were spotted on a riverbank after an extreme drought last week caused water levels to plummet to their lowest level in more than a century.

Most of the engravings on the River Negro – a major tributary of the Amazon – are of facial expressions, some smiling and others looking grim.

Several have been seen before but now there are a greater variety it should help to establish the origin of the carvings, experts say.

‘The engravings are prehistoric, or precolonial. We cannot date them exactly, but based on evidence of human occupation of the area, we believe they are about 1,000 to 2,000 years old,’ said archaeologist Jaime de Santana Oliveira.

In one particular area there are smooth grooves which are thought to be where Indigenous inhabitants once sharpened their arrows and spears long before Europeans arrived. 

Livia Ribeiro, who lives in Amazon’s largest city, Manaus, went to look at the rock engravings after hearing about them from friends.

‘I thought it was a lie … I had never seen this. I’ve lived in Manaus for 27 years,’ she added. 

The area where the carvings were spotted is called Ponto das Lajes, which is on the north shore of the Amazon close to where the Rio Negro and Solimoes rivers join.

Some of them were previously spotted for the first time 12 years ago, but with water levels now dropping to the lowest in 121 years, others have emerged too.

So severe is the drought that the Rio Negro has dropped by 49.2ft (15m) since July, exposing a number of previously unseen rocks on the riverbed.

‘This time we found not just more carvings but the sculpture of a human face cut into the rock,’ said Oliveira, who works for the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute that oversees the preservation of historic sites.

‘The site expresses emotions, feelings, it is an engraved rock record, but it has something in common with current works of art,’ he added.

Despite the excitement, however, the emergence of these previously unknown petroglyphs has also caused concern among the local community.

Drought in the Amazon has caused river levels to drop dramatically in the past few weeks, which is particularly damaging to a region that depends on a maze of waterways for transportation and supplies. 

Normally bustling riverbanks are instead dry and filled with stranded boats.

‘We come, we look at (the engravings) and we think they are beautiful. But at the same time, it is worrying… I also think about whether this river will exist in 50 or 100 years,’ said Ribeiro.

Historian Beatriz Carneiro said she hoped the latest discovery would help better understand the first people who inhabited the region, but also voiced concern about the knock-on effect of how it came about.

‘Unhappily it is now reappearing with the worsening of the drought,’ she added. 

‘Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work.’

The country’s dry season has worsened this year because of El Nino, experts say.

This is an irregular climate pattern over the Pacific Ocean that disrupts normal weather, adding to the effect of climate change.

Research has previously suggested huge swathes of the Amazon rainforest were grassland until just 2,000 years ago, which is about the time these carvings are thought to date back to.

The study authors said they believed much of the area was grassland until a natural shift to a wetter climate let the rainforests form. This challenges the common belief that the world’s biggest tropical forest is far older.

The arrival of European diseases after Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492 may also have hastened the growth of forests by killing indigenous people farming the region, the scientists wrote in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).