It’s unclear when ancient humans first arrived on the shores of Sulawesi, a 71,898-square-mile Indonesian island west of Borneo. The oldest known skeletons date to 16,000 to 25,000 years ago, and some stone tools and rock shelters date back more than 118,000 years. The abundance and density of fossils of long-extinct megafauna, which suggest they were hunted to extinction, suggest that other hominid species may have colonized the island even earlier, perhaps as early as 194,000 years ago, when Indonesia was still connected to the rest of Asia by a land bridge.
Equally puzzling are the origins of the island’s vast cave paintings: the oldest, a 14-foot-wide depiction of spear-wielding stick figures surrounding what archaeologists call a “warthog” or “little bull,” was originally dated to 45,500 years ago, making it not only the oldest in Asia but one of the oldest in the world.
According to a recently published study, Nature This prehistoric work of art has been dated to a minimum of 51,200 years ago, raising further questions about our understanding of when and where humans first developed the ability to create figurative imagery.
How to date cave paintings
Discovered in 2017 at the archaeological site of Leang Karampuang, near the southernmost tip of the island, the painting of a pig and a cow was dated in the same way as other cave paintings: by measuring the decay of uranium atoms in the rock formations the ancient artists used as their canvas. Until recently, this was done by physically excavating pieces of rock and placing them under a spectrometer to detect levels of uranium decay.
Though the technique is tried and tested, it does have drawbacks: Researchers can only take very small samples to avoid damaging the cave art, and the samples often contain not only the original rock wall but also other, younger layers of sediment that have been deposited. rear The site of what archaeologists call “cave popcorn,” a cave painting. By taking an average of both the new and older layers, physical sampling tends to yield minimum and maximum dates that are conservative, but not necessarily accurate.
The recent study used a new measurement technique called laser ablation, which uses a laser to scan the rock walls without taking physical samples. In addition to being faster, cheaper and less destructive, this technique allows researchers to distinguish between layers of sediment and measure only those that are relevant to date the cave art.
The researchers note that while younger sediment layers “would be impossible to avoid during microexcavation,” laser ablation “can reveal these localized areas of dual sedimentation.” [popcorn] Can be easily avoided in calculations (i.e. not integrated) [Uranium]”We estimate the age from map data.”
Although laser ablation has a larger margin of error than physical samples due to the small sample size, the authors, led by Indonesian archaeologist Adi Orgus Octaviana, say that laser ablation yields older dates and therefore more accurate minimum age estimates. This makes the technique a valuable asset in studies such as those of cave paintings found at Leang Karampuang, which are poorly preserved and covered in mineral-rich popcorn deposited after the artworks were created. If the presence of popcorn in the physical samples allowed a conservative estimate of 45,500 years ago, laser ablation confidently raised the minimum age of the paintings to 51,200 years ago, a difference as large as the time that separates modern times from the dawn of Mesopotamian civilization.
The origins of art
The conclusions presented by Octaviana’s team call into question our conception of when and where the ability to create art evolved: “Currently, the oldest widely accepted evidence of human image-making dates from the Mesolithic,” the authors note. [c. 100 to 75,000 years ago]composed of geometric motifs.”
Archaeologists previously Figurative Figurative art — images that represent objects and tell stories — emerged in Europe during the Late Pleistocene, but the newly dated Sulawesi rock paintings suggest that it emerged before ancient humans migrated into Asia 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. Experts such as British anthropologist Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum recently told the BBC that Octaviana’s research provides reason to believe the emergence of figurative art may predate human migration out of Africa. (Ancient art has been found in Africa, but it was not figurative.)
But that if The drawings of warty pigs and tiny cows are certainly the work of ancient humans. Uranium measurements help date the drawings, but unfortunately they tell us nothing about the hand of the artist. Given that other hominin species lived on Sulawesi before humans arrived, Homo sapiensBut it’s also possible that these paintings are actually the work of extinct human relatives: the world’s oldest cave paintings, found in the Maltravieso Cave in Spain, are thought to have been made by Neanderthals around 66,700 years ago and are nothing more than a series of handprints. Either other species of hominins were capable of creating representational art (for which conclusive evidence has yet to be found), or humans themselves learned to do so much earlier than previously thought.
This question is by no means trivial, since the emergence of representational art not only played an important role in the evolution of our cognitive abilities, but also in the development of civilization, allowing our ancestors to record and easily transmit ideas, feelings and social practices.
As Octaviana and her co-authors explain in their study:
“The juxtaposition of figures forming a narrative scene, as opposed to the depiction of a single person, allows a story to be told through a picture, communicating the story to an audience even when the maker of the art is not present. Scene-making is therefore associated with increasing the likelihood that drawings left on a rock face will convey a particular story (such as a myth) over a long period of time, especially when combined with oral traditions.”
Many questions remain about the origins of figurative art, but laser ablation of other cave paintings in Europe, Asia and Africa may provide answers in the future.
