CAVE PAINTINGS CHANGE IDEAS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF ART
By Pallab Ghosh, Science Correspondent, BBC News
Date of Site: 10/8/2014 Date Accessed: 7/24/2015
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29415716
Scientists have identified some of the earliest cave paintings produced by humans.
The artworks are in a rural area on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi.
Until now, paintings this old had been confirmed in caves only in Western Europe.
Researchers tell the journal Nature that the Indonesian discovery transforms ideas about how
humans first developed the ability to produce art.
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Australian and Indonesian scientists have dated layers of stalactite-like growths that have formed over
coloured outlines of human hands.
Early artists made them by carefully blowing paint around hands that were pressed tightly against
the cave walls and ceilings. The oldest is at least 40,000 years old.
This painting, from Bone, is of a variety a wild endemic dwarfed bovid found only in Sulawesi, which
the inhabitants probably hunted.
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There are also human figures, and pictures of wild hoofed animals that are found only on the island.
Dr Maxime Aubert, of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, who dated the paintings found in
Maros in Southern Sulawesi, explained that one of them (shown immediately below) was probably
the earliest of its type.
At the top of the worn painting is a faint outline of a human hand. Below it is possibly the earliest
depiction of an animal.
"The minimum age for (the outline of the hand) is 39,900 years old, which makes it the oldest hand
stencil in the world," said Dr Aubert.
"Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest
figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one," he told BBC News.
There are also paintings in the caves that are around 27,000 years old, which means that the
inhabitants were painting for at least 13,000 years.
In addition, there are paintings in a cave in the regency of Bone, 100 km north of Maros. These
cannot be dated because the stalactite-like growths used to determine the age of the art do not
occur. But the researchers believe that they are probably the same age as the paintings in Maros
because they are stylistically identical.
The discovery of the Indonesian cave art is important because it shows the beginnings of human
intelligence as we understand it today.
Art and the ability to think of abstract concepts is what distinguishes our species from other
animals - capabilities that also led us to use fire, develop the wheel and come up with the other
technologies that have made our kind so successful.
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Its emergence, therefore, marks one of the key moments when our species became truly human.
The dating of the art in Sulawesi will mean that ideas about when and where this pivotal moment in
our evolution occurred will now have to be revised.
Compare the painting above from Bone with the one immediately below, which is from El Castillo cave
in northern Spain, and dated to be 37,300 years old by researchers at Bristol University.
The Sulawesian and Spanish paintings look very similar, and they are both about the same age.
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For decades, the only evidence of ancient cave art was in Spain and southern France. It led some to
believe that the creative explosion that led to the art and science we know today began in Europe.
But the discovery of paintings of a similar age in Indonesia shatters this view, according to Prof
Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
"It is a really important find; it enables us to get away from this Euro-centric view of a creative
explosion that was special to Europe and did not develop in other parts of the world until much
later," he said.
The discovery of 40,000-year-old cave paintings at opposite ends of the globe suggests that the
ability to create representational art had its origins further back in time in Africa, before modern
humans spread across the rest of the world.
"That's kind of my gut feeling," says Prof Stringer. "The basis for this art was there 60,000 years
ago; it may even have been there in Africa before 60,000 years ago and it spread with modern
humans."
Dr Adam Brumm, who is the co-leader of the Sulawesi research, believes many well-known sites in
Asia, and as far away as Australia, contain art that is extremely old but which has not yet been
accurately dated.
"If Sulawesi is anything to go by, where cave art was first recorded over half a century ago but was
assumed to be young, a crucial part of the human story could be right under our noses," he said.
Dr Muhammad Ramli, an archaeologist working with the Makassar branch of Indonesia's
Preservation for Heritage Office, said that the Sulawesian paintings in Maros were being eroded by
the pollution coming from an upsurge in local industrial activities.
"In the beginning of the 1980s, there were a lot of cave paintings on this site in the form of hand
stencils, as you can see right now. Presently, a lot has been damaged.
"There is a strong necessity to conduct conservation studies in order to find the best way of
preserving these sites so that the paintings may last," he told BBC News.
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