Archaeologists Discover Thousand-Year-Old 141-Foot Painting of Giant Snake in South America

Archaeologists have discovered one of the largest collections of ancient art , featuring a 141-foot painting of a giant snake , in the Orinoco Valley in South America .

Knewz.com has learned that the thousand-year-old "gallery" contains around 10,000 engravings.

Discovered along the Colombia/ Venezuela border, the collection contains pictures of animals like monkeys, crocodiles , dogs, and jaguars, as well as insects , reptiles, and humans .

Archaeologists have also found numerous geometric engravings at the site, mostly concentric circles, grid patterns, and dot-filled triangles, although their meaning is yet to be deciphered.

The sheer number of engravings makes the site at the Orinoco Valley one of the biggest collections of rock art in the world.

Archaeologists found the engravings in around 157 clusters along a 110-mile stretch of the Orinoco River.

"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," Dr. Philip Riris of Bournemouth University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology said in a statement via The Independent .

"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 colonization," Dr. Riris, who is one of the leaders of the project, added.

"We hope that our research work will help ensure that the extraordinary artistic heritage of the Orinoco Valley is protected and that local indigenous and mixed-heritage communities will become involved in that process."

However, what makes the site in South America even more unique is the fact that some of the engravings are colossal. Apart from the 141-foot giant snake, the collection also features around 60 paintings whose dimensions exceed 33 feet.

"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)," The Independent reported.

The massive engraving of the snake has led the archaeologists to believe that it might be related to the global “mega-serpent” tradition, i.e. the belief that many different cultures had the tradition of worshipping snakes.

The team of archaeologists published a paper on the possible implications of the gigantic snake paintings in the Orinoco Valley, where they said:

"Boas and anacondas are prominent actors in Indigenous cosmologies across northern South America, and the significance of serpents appears to cut across linguistic and ethnic boundaries. Snakes feature repeatedly in creation myths and are charged with potentially dangerous generative (often sexualized) forces."

"In Arawak and Tukanoan myths of the north-west Amazon, serpents emerged from chthonic headwaters, before creating the world's rivers and metaphorical waterways such as the Milky Way... Hence, serpent canoes were containers of men and an analogue for feminine reproductive power."

The Independent reported that one can find similar examples of giant snakes painted or engraved onto the earth in California, Ohio , and Peru , among other places. The biggest one is a 900-year-old earthwork on a hilltop in Southern Ohio that spans over 1,300 feet.