Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known, analysis has shown.
The rock art was originally discovered in caves on the island of Sulawesi in the 1950s, but was thought to be less than 10,000 years old because scientists thought older paintings could not possibly survive in a tropical climate.
But fresh analysis of the pictures by an Australian-Indonesian team has stunned researchers by dating one hand marking to at least 39,900 years old, and two paintings of animals — a pig-deer or babirusa, and another animal, probably a wild pig — to at least 35,400 and 35,700 years ago respectively.
The work reveals that rather than Europe being at the heart of an explosion of creative brilliance when modern humans arrived from Africa, the early settlers of Asia were creating their own artworks at the same time or even earlier.
Archaeologists have not ruled out that the different groups of colonising humans developed their artistic skills independently of one another, but an enticing alternative is that the modern human ancestors of both were artists before they left the African continent.
“Our discovery on Sulawesi shows that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins, perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe,” said Dr Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales.
The paintings adorn the walls of caves and shelters at the foot of spectacular limestone towers that rise up from the surrounding rice fields near Maros in south-west Sulawesi.
The caves enthralled the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent months in Maros collecting butterflies, though he appeared not to have spotted the abundant rock art, said Dr Adam Brumm, a co-author on the study at Wollongong.
The paintings were made with the natural mineral pigment ochre — probably ironstone haematite — which the hunter-gatherers ground to a powder and mixed with water or other liquids to create paint.
Long ago, the walls and ceilings of the caves might have been covered with images that provide a window into the minds of the ice age occupants. Common among the artworks are ghostly hand markings made by blowing, spraying or spitting a mouthful of paint over an outstretched hand. The result — a hand stencil, the negative of a conventional print made by dipping the hand in paint — was an enduring personal signature on the cave wall.
“It remains a mystery what hand stencils meant to the prehistoric artists of Sulawesi, and why they created them in such abundance,” said Mr. Brumm. The researchers dated 12 hand stencils and two figurative paintings of animals in seven caves near Maros. The most recent hand stencil was created about 17,400 years ago, according to details published in Nature .
The hunter-gatherers preyed on the unique land mammals that evolved in isolation on Sulawesi, an ancient island that has been called the Madagascar of Indonesia.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
