Prehistoric paintings at least 40,000 years old that depict animals — including one known as a “pig-deer” — and the outline of human hands in seven caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting the history of art.
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,” dating expert Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University said.
Photo: AFP
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, archeologist Thomas Sutikna of Australia’s University of Wollongong added.
“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.
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.
“Archeologists 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 archeologist Adam Brumm, also of Griffith University.
The study appears in the journal Nature.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing