Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be Among

the Oldest Known

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORDOCT. 8, 2014
Hand outlines found on a cave wall in Indonesia are at least 39,900 years old, researchers said. Credit
Kinez Riza
There is nothing like a blank stone
surface to inspire a widely shared urge
to make art.
A team of researchers reported in the
journal Nature on Wednesday that
paintings of hands and animals in
seven limestone caves on the
Indonesian island of Sulawesi may be
as old as the earliest European cave art.
The oldest cave painting known until
now is a 40,800-year-old red disk from
El Castillo, in northern Spain.
Other archaeologists of human origins said the new findings were spectacular and, in at least one sense,
unexpected. Sulawesis cave art, first described in the 1950s, had previously been dismissed as no more
than 10,000 years old.
Assuming that the dates are good, Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tbingen in
Germany, said in an email, this is good news, and the only surprising thing is not that analogous finds
would exist elsewhere, but rather that it has been so hard to find them until now.
Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York, agreed that the
discovery certainly makes sense. Recent genetic findings, he said, support an early deployment of
modern humans eastward to Southeast Asia and Australasia, and so having art of a similar age is
reasonable as well.
The authors of the new study, a team from Australia and Indonesia, used a uranium decay technique to
date the substance that encrusts the wall paintings a mineral called calcite, created by water flowing
through the limestone in the cave. The art beneath is presumably somewhat older than the crust.
Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, research fellows at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and
the leaders of the study, examined 12 images of human hands and two figurative animal depictions at the
cave sites.
The researchers said the earliest images, with a minimum age of 39,900 years, are the oldest known
stenciled outlines of human hands in the world. Blowing or spraying pigment around a hand pressed
against rock surfaces would become a common practice among cave artists down through the ages and
even some of the youngest schoolchildren to this day.

A painting of an animal known as a pig deer, of the species babirusa, was determined to be at least 35,400
years old. The team concluded that it was among the earliest dated figurative depiction worldwide, if not
the earliest one.
The closest in age from Western Europe is a painting of a rhinoceros from Chauvet Cave in France, dated
at 35,000 years old, although some archaeologists have questioned that estimate. The most familiar rock
art in the region of Sulawesi was created by the Aborigines of Australia, modern humans who arrived
there 50,000 years ago. But none of the surviving rock art is older than 30,000 years.
The Sulawesi dates challenge the long-held view about the origins of cave art in an explosion of human
creativity centered on Western Europe about 40,000 years ago, Dr. Aubert said, in an announcement
issued by Griffith University.
Instead, he said, the creative brilliance required to produce the lifelike portrayals of horses and other
animals much later at famous sites like Chauvet and Lascaux in France could have particularly deep roots
within the human lineage.
But it is too soon to assess the discoverys deeper implications, Wil Roebroeks, a specialist in human
origins studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report.
Whether rock art was an integral part of the cultural repertoire of colonizing modern humans, from
Western Europe to southeast and beyond, or whether such practices developed independently in various
regions, is unknown, he wrote.
But what is clear, Dr. Roebroeks continued, is that no figurative art is known from before the time of
the initial expansion of Homo sapiens into Asia and across Europe neither from earlier H. sapiens in
Africa nor from their contemporaries in western Eurasia, the Neanderthals.
Dr. Conard, of Tbingen University, said he had long argued for what he calls polycentric mosaic
modernity, in which similar kinds of cultural innovations happened in different contexts as modern Homo
sapiens spread across the world and displaced archaic hominins.
I have never thought that complex symbolic behavior has a single point source and that cultural
evolutions is like switching a light on, he said. One would expect different regions to have distinctive
signatures and to contribute to the story in their own way.
Dr. Delson, of CUNY, said he tended to prefer the idea that art came as part of the baggage of Homo
sapiens as they spread into Eurasia, mainly as we know that so many of the cultural features once thought
to have developed in western Eurasia in fact occurred far earlier in Africa.
He cited the examples of early use of pigments and engravings in Africa, as well as bodily adornment
with shells and advanced stoneworking technology.
In their report, Dr. Aubert and Dr. Brumm took no sides in the debate. It is possible that rock art emerged
independently around the same time and at roughly both ends of the spatial distribution of early modern
humans, they concluded. An alternate scenario, however, is that cave painting was widely practiced by
the first H. sapiens to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier.
If that is the case, the Australian-Indonesian research team predicted, We can expect future discoveries
of depictions of human hands, figurative art and other forms of image-making dating to the earliest period
of the global dispersal of our species.

Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be Among

the Oldest Known