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 Scientists said on Wednesday they used a highly precise method to
determine the antiquity of the paintings. They found the artwork was
comparable in age to the oldest-known rock art from Europe, long
thought to be the cradle of the early human cultural achievement
embodied by cave painting.
"It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centerpiece
of a symbolic explosion in early human artistic activity such as
cave painting and other forms of image-making, including figurative
art, around 40,000 years ago," said dating expert Maxime Aubert of
Australia's Griffith University.
The fact that people in Sulawesi were doing the same things as
contemporaries in Europe indicates cave art may have emerged
independently at about the same time around the world, including
Europe and Southeast Asia, added archeologist Thomas Sutikna of
Australia's University of Wollongong.
"Rock art is one of the indicators of an abstract mind of the past
human, the onset of what we might consider to be one of the
hallmarks of 'modern' humans," Sutikna added.
The study focused on 14 cave paintings: 12 human hand stencils and
two naturalistic animal depictions, one showing an animal called a
babirusa, or "pig-deer," and the other showing what probably is a
pig.
They were painted in limestone caves near Maros in southern
Sulawesi, a large island east of Borneo.
Most of the artwork was created with a pigment called red ochre to
produce red- and mulberry-colored paintings. The art's existence had
been known for decades, but its age had never been determined. Some
experts estimated it was maybe 10,000 years old.
The scientists used a method based on the radioactive decay of tiny
quantities of uranium in small mineral growths dubbed "cave popcorn"
that formed on some of the paintings.
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The oldest Sulawesian artwork, a hand outline at least about 40,000
years ago, was comparable in age to the world's oldest-known rock
art image, a red dot from Spain's El Castillo site.
The ages for the animal paintings at the famed Chauvet and Lascaux
cave sites in France are more recent - between about 26,000 and
18,000 years old - than Sulawesi's figurative animals, which are at
least 35,000 years old. The babirusa image represents the
oldest-known, reliably dated figurative depiction, Aubert said.
The artists made hand images by blowing or spraying paint around
hands pressed against rock surfaces.
"Archaeologists love to say things like 'ability X is what makes us
human,' but in the case of the origins of art they are probably
right. Our species is compelled to make art. And in one form or
another, it is inherent in almost everything we do," said
archaeologist Adam Brumm, also of Griffith University.
The study appears in the journal Nature.
(Reporting by Will Dunham. Editing by Andre Grenon)
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