06/07/2024 – 5:16
Analysis published in the journal ‘Nature’ suggests that a scene of humans interacting with a pig is a landmark in history. What is the oldest story ever recorded by humans? Scientists now think it is a story as old as time – humanity’s place in nature – painted deep inside a cave in Indonesia.
It is a scene of humans interacting with a pig, painted on a wall with red and black pigments. The light from a torch causes the figures to dance and jump, animating the scene into a story.
A new analysis, published July 3 in the journal Nature, finds that this sophisticated scene of human-animal interactions is about 51,200 years old, making it tens of thousands of years older than other cave art found in places like Lascaux Cave in France.
“We as humans define ourselves as a storytelling species. These [pinturas] are the oldest evidence that we do this. It shows that painters were conveying more information than just static images,” says Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who led the study.
The oldest narrative found so far
Aubert’s team studied the layers of art covering the walls of a limestone cave called Leang Bulu Sipong 4 on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Previous work at the cave has shown that homo sapiens, or modern humans, visited the site over thousands of years, leaving their stories on the walls between 27,000 and 44,000 years ago.
The art is preserved behind a layer of calcium carbonate that has formed on the cave wall over thousands of years, trapping the art like an insect in amber.
Previous dating techniques, called uranium-thorium chronology, dated the earliest art to about 44,000 years old. But a new version of the method, which uses a laser to sample the rock, has allowed for a “more accurate and efficient” way to pinpoint the date the painting was made, Aubert said.
The new method pushed back the date of the cave art by 4,000 years, to around 48,000 years ago.
Aubert’s team also used the method on an earlier undated section of figurative art in the nearby Leang Karampuang cave. The scene shows humans interacting with a pig-like animal.
The analysis found that the art is 51,200 years old, making it the oldest human-created scene discovered to date.
50,000 years ago, a “golden point” in human evolution
However, Indonesia’s rock art is not the oldest in the world – that title belongs to Cueva de los Aviones in Spain.
But Indonesian cave art is far more sophisticated, argues George Nash, an archaeologist at the University of Coimbra in Portugal who was not involved in the study.
“The rock art in Spain is mostly handprints, but the rock art in Indonesia is much more sophisticated and probably contains more narratives. The question is: What is going on in Sulawesi, Indonesia, with sophisticated art being produced at this time? Very little art has been dated to more than 50,000 years old,” Nash told DW.
The 50,000-year threshold is seen by archaeologists as a “golden point” in human evolution because it was when “the most adventurous modern humans moved into East Asia, Indonesia and Australia, which at that time were all connected by a giant landmass,” Nash explains. Other figurative artworks have also been found on the nearby island of Borneo.
Modern techniques for studying rock art, coupled with genetic analysis of ancient remains, have mapped the dispersal of modern humans across the globe with remarkable accuracy.
Nash said that 10 years ago the field was very Eurocentric, but new, broader approaches are putting us “on the verge of discovering some wonderful things about the movement of homo sapiens around the world and our relationships with Neanderthals.”
For example: Nash believes that interspecies relationships may have influenced human cave art. “Fifty thousand [anos atrás] “It’s a melting pot where migrating humans and Neanderthals were learning from each other,” he says. “We don’t know what the speech meant, but one result may have been more sophisticated art.”
Is it really a cave narrative?
The authors said their findings suggest that homo sapiens developed a rich storytelling culture in Indonesia long before our evolution. Artists composed scenes to tell visual stories about human-animal relationships.
Although João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon, praised the study’s methods, he was more critical of its interpretation.
“The authors provide no evidence that the different things they dated form an integrated whole. ‘Narrative’ and ‘storytelling’ can be found in the paper by Aubert et al., not in the art itself,” he told DW in an email.
George Nash believes that rock art had narrative characteristics. “It’s like the symbol of a cross. Any Christian can create a complex narrative from a simple figurative drawing,” he argues.
The same is true of Australian Aboriginal art, he continues, where the simplicity of an animal’s form can tell a complex story.
Searching for fossils in the North Sea
Although the actual meaning of this cave art is lost, Nash strongly suspects that the drawing had ceremonial or ritual value because it was found at the back of caves, where storytelling likely took place.
“It is intangible evidence, but it fits into the use of various approaches, such as archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, to understand the past,” he says.
Nash said it was great that Aubert’s team analyzed the rock art using more accurate dating methods, adding that more research needs to be done on the topic.
“I bet we would find art that is over 60,000 years old,” he said. “If so, it would completely change our understanding of modern humans.”
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