Oldest cave art ever discovered in Indonesia
A hand stencil in an Indonesian cave may shed light on when early humans migrated to Australia, breaking the previous record for the oldest known cave artwork, dating back at least 15,000 years.
Narrow-fingered hand stencils from the Leang Jari site in Maros Regency on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
In an Indonesian cave system known for its prehistoric art Oldest cave art ever found Was hidden in plain sight. In a cave filled with well-studied paintings over the years, a blurry hand stencil on the ceiling had been overlooked. A new chemical analysis of the stencil shows it is at least 67,800 years old, which is surprisingly 15,000 years older than the next oldest cave art found on the same island, Sulawesi. A nearby stencil is approximately 60,900 years old.
“We knew they were probably going to get older…, but we didn’t know how old,” says study co-author Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Australia.
Record-breaking discovery, published today Nature, Valuable information can be found about the first humans to reach Australia.
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Study co-author Shinatriya is working in Adhityatama Cave.
The researchers used lasers instead of normal drilling to take samples to date the art. This allowed them to test more areas and therefore get a more accurate date range than with older methods.
The age of this previously undiscovered artifact “is truly astonishing,” says Franco Viviani, a physical anthropologist who was not involved in the new study. Viviani says that moving back the timeline of cave art gives us new insights into what ancient societies were capable of. He says, “They confirm what is known today: the arts have a positive relationship with critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills.”
Scientists were already aware of the art-making ability of early humans and other ancient hominins, such as shell ornaments made by humans at least 70,000 years ago and the 57,000-year-old engraved bones of Neanderthals. Still, the new study finds the cave art is one of the oldest evidence of painting ever found by modern humans, and its distinctive style gives a view into the minds of the people who created it.
Figures visible on the walls of the cave.
Consistent with the style, which has so far been found only in Sulawesi, the hand is depicted with pointed, claw-like fingers. The researchers believe this style may serve to emphasize the close relationship between humans and animals, which “is something we already see in very early painted art from Sulawesi, which depicts at least one example of a scene that we interpret as a representation of partly human, partly animal,” co-author Adam Brumm of Griffith University said in a statement.
These clues about the culture of the people who created this art are particularly interesting to researchers because they can shed light on the lives of the first humans to migrate to Australia. Archaeologists have long suspected that the first inhabitants of Australia traveled through Indonesia, but because of uncertainties in the DNA and archaeological evidence that has been discovered to date, they have debated whether this happened 65,000 or 50,000 years ago. The presence of such old art suggests that humans had likely made their way to the continent even earlier, possibly making the first deliberate long-distance sea voyage.
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