PRE-DATES ASID—GUEST BLOG—By Sarah
Pruitt, History.com--Indonesian Cave Paintings May Be Among World’s Oldest Art.
The series of images being discussed here, including the stenciled outlines of
human hands and the stick-legged figures of animals, were discovered back in
the 1950s, adorning the walls of limestone caves on the Indonesian island of
Sulawesi.
Though
the paintings had long been assumed to be no more than 10,000 years old, a
group of researchers from Indonesia and Australia have now dated the earliest
examples to as many as 40,000 years ago, or around the same age as similar
paintings found on the walls of caves in France and Spain.
For
decades after the series of cave paintings were discovered in the limestone
caves and rock shelters on Sulawesi, scientists dismissed the possibility that
they could have been created any more than 10,000 years ago. The region’s humid
climate would have destroyed anything older, they reasoned. But according to
the findings of a new study, reported this week in the journal Nature, the
Sulawesi cave paintings are far older than previously thought, and may in fact
be as old as the earliest European cave art.
Led
by Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Queensland,
Australia, a team of Indonesian and Australian researchers set out to date the
paintings–or, more accurately–the bumpy layer of calcium carbonate that formed
on top of them, using a technique known as uranium-thorium dating. By measuring
the decay rate of uranium as it turns to thorium, the scientists could estimate
the age of the mineral layer to a high degree of accuracy. As this crust is
presumably somewhat younger than the artwork it covers, the dating process gave
them a minimum age for the paintings underneath.
After
examining 12 images of human hands and two depictions of animal figures found
on the walls of seven different caves, the researchers found that one hand
image was at least 39,900 years old. Though the practice of blowing or spraying
pigment around a hand pressed to the rock’s surface would become common among
cave artists through the ages (and continues among young schoolchildren today),
the Sulawesi image appears to be the earliest example of its kind–some 2,000
years older than the minimum age of the oldest European hand stencil.
In
addition, the scientists found that one of the animal paintings, a depiction of
an animal known as a babirusa, or “pig deer,” dated back at least 35,400 years.
Though the hand stencils appear similar to the ones found in Europe, the animal
images are quite different in style. According to Alistair Pike, an
archaeologist at the University of Southampton (UK) who was not involved in the
new study, the images found in Indonesia “look ‘line-y’, almost like brush
strokes,” while the early European images “look dabbed, almost like finger
paint.”
In
recent years, archeologists have used similar dating techniques to estimate the
age of the oldest cave painting to have been discovered in Europe, a red disk
painted on the walls of a Spanish cave called El Castillo that is at least
40,800 years old. The earliest depiction of an animal found in Europe is a
rhinoceros painted on the wall of France’s Chauvet Cave, which has been dated
to between 35,300 to 38,827 years ago.
The
discovery that the art in Sulawesi dates back at least as far as such paintings
challenges the long-held theory that cave art emerged in a burst of creativity
in Western Europe some 40,000 years ago. As Aubert puts it: “There was some
idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings.
Now we can say that’s not true.” Instead, the creative tradition might have
arisen separately around the same time, on different sides of the world;
alternatively, it could have even deeper roots within the human lineage. The
new research seems to support this theory, according to co-leader Brumm: “Cave
painting and related forms of artistic expression were most likely part of the cultural
traditions of the first modern humans to spread out of Africa and into Asia and
Australia, long before they reached Europe.”
Some
scientists prefer the theory that cave art began in Africa, where the human
species goes back some 200,000 years. Though archeological sites in Africa tend
to be located in shallow caves where the conditions are not ideal for
preserving such artwork, evidence of the use of pigments, engravings and
personal adornments such as beads and other jewelry point to the artistic
sensibilities of Homo sapiens long before they migrated to Europe and Asia.
SOURCE: Image courtesy of The Associated Press/Kinez Riza
No comments:
Post a Comment