A drawing of humanoid figures hunting a wild pig is the oldest work of art reported to date: it was painted 51,200 years ago in a cave on the island of Celebes, (Sulawesi, in the local language), in Indonesia. The discovery, made by an international team of scientists and released this Wednesday in the magazine Naturesuggests that scenes composed of people and animals in art have an even older origin than previously thought.
Prehistoric rock art extends our understanding of early human cultures, but dating it reliably is one of the most difficult tasks. In 2018, Archaeologist Maxime Aubert Together with his colleagues, he discovered the oldest figurative painting in a corner of the island of Borneo (Indonesia), of an animal impaled on a spear, dated at 40,000 years old. Months later, in 2019, another composition surpassed it in age: two wild boars, four dwarf buffalos and eight humanoid figures are believed to have been drawn on the island of Sulawesi 4,000 years earlier. Today, the team has risen to the challenge and developed a much more precise laser dating method. Thanks to this, they have discovered that the paintings that had been found years before are even older. They now know that the one from Sulawesi that came to light in 2019 is at least 48,000 years old and dates back the appearance of figurative art by at least 5,700 years. And the one from 2018 is even older. “For the first time, we have reliably dated rock art dating back more than 50,000 years,” the scientist said.
The human ability to tell stories
Whether the art depicts a hunt or another event, it is likely the oldest story told in pictures. Scientists believe the artists were Homo sapiens, our own species, when they arrived on these islands in Southeast Asia. The art is not simple, but “quite advanced,” according to Aubert, “and demonstrates the mental ability of the people of that time.”
The ability to tell stories is a trait that has been considered fundamental to human cultural evolution. The oldest evidence is the engraved ochre nodules found in South Africa and dated to 100,000 years ago. The evidence then goes forward 50,000 years to this latest find. “There is nothing else in between that we are currently aware of,” admits Aubert, although he is confident of future discoveries: “We will probably find older rock art.”
The first discoveries in Indonesia proved that figurative art did not originate in Europe. But cave art developed and evolved in much the same way elsewhere in the world. In Europe, the oldest animals are from the Chauvet cave in France, which are more than 30,000 years old. Diego Garatea professor of prehistory at the University of Cantabria who was not involved in the study, describes it as “curious” that hunting scenes have been depicted for millennia and in similar ways all over the world. This raises questions about whether the inhabitants of Asia and Europe invented symbolic art on their own or whether the humans who conquered the world from Africa were already artists who told stories with images.
“It is a paradigm shift, we have moved from Eurocentrism to thinking about other possibilities,” says Gárate regarding the Indonesian works found in recent years. He therefore applauds the discovery, but highlights some aspects: “It is not a competition to see who is the oldest. The next objective is to find out who the people who made these works were, since we do not know much about them.”
The new technique for dating cave paintings, called LA-U-series, uses a laser to analyse samples in minute detail and provide better estimates. “In short, it is more precise and more efficient,” Aubert explains. This is a significant advance in cave art dating that could be used in the future, as it requires much smaller samples and reduces damage to the works. The method could be applied to other paintings and possibly in other geological contexts such as sandstone.
The more knowledge advances, the more mysterious the origins of humans and their artistic manifestations become, as at any moment a new discovery can disprove all previous theories. For this reason, Aubert stresses the importance of continuing to explore and preserve prehistoric treasures: “Humans have probably been telling stories for much longer than 51,200 years.”
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