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By Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert, Griffith University, and Pindi Setiawan, Teknologi Bandung Institute
Rock paintings in the remote mountains of Borneo date back to at least 40,000 years ago – much earlier than expected – according to a study published in Nature last week.
These works include a painting of what appears to be a local species of wild cattle, making it the oldest example of figurative art in the world, that is, an image that resembles what it is supposed to be. represent.
This discovery adds to the growing sense that early rock art traditions did not appear in Europe, as was long believed.
Remote rock art
In the 1990s, French and Indonesian archaeologists visited the remote mountains of eastern Kalimantan, an Indonesian province of Borneo.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan, author provided
In limestone caves perched atop forbidden peaks and densely wooded, the team discovers a vast collection of prehistoric works, including thousands of stencils (negative outlines of human hands) and rarer paintings of animals.
Strikingly, apart from the paintings themselves, the team found little other evidence of human occupation in the caves. It seemed that people had been doing long and dangerous climbs in these caves at the top of a cliff, mainly to create art.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan, author provided
The team proposed that prehistoric works of art could be divided into at least two distinct phases of artistic production.
The first phase is characterized by hand stencils and large figurative paintings of orange-red animals.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan, author provided
Stencils in the hand also characterize the later phase, but these stencils (and badociated images) tend to be dark purple ("mulberry"). During this phase, the artists also painted tattoo-like designs on the wrists, palms and fingers of some stencils. In some cases, the hand stencils were connected by patterns resembling tree branches or vines.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan, author provided
Finally, the artists began to represent human figures in their art (see the image above).
This amazing discovery has raised a host of questions. How old was the rock art? Who created it and why?
In the early 2000s, the Franco-Indonesian team dated a part of a cave drapery training that had developed on the stencil by hand.
The quality of the sample with which they dated was not ideal, but their results implied an age of at least 10,000 years for the underlying art work .
New dates for the ancient art
We now think that the works of Borneo are much older than what we thought before, according to a study we conducted with colleagues from the National Center for Research in Archeology (ARKENAS) in Jakarta and from India. other Indonesian scientists.
In our article, we report dates of uranium series obtained from calcium carbonate samples collected in badociation with rock paintings from six sites in East Kalimantan. This provides the first reliable estimates of the approximate time of rock art production.
Source of the map: NASA / NGS / USGS Arc-Second Global Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); GEBCO_2014 Grid, version 20150318, (gebco.net). Base maps generated with the help of ArcGIS by M. Kottermair and A. Jalandoni. Design and formatting of figures: Adam Brumm, author provided
The oldest rock art image is a large orange-reddish painting depicting an animal, similar to the wild banteng that is still found in the Borneo jungle. This is at least 40,000 years old.
As far as we can judge, it is the oldest figurative art work dated on Earth.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan, author provided
It has been shown that the orange-red stencil stencil was the same age, suggesting that the first rock art style appeared about 52,000 to 40,000 years ago.
The paintings on the oldest mulberry trees, including hand – decorated stencils, date from about 21,000 to 20,000 years ago. A human mulberry figure was created at least 13,600 years ago.
Our dating implies that a major change took place about 20,000 years ago in the rock art culture of Borneo. It was during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a time when the ice caps were at their greatest extent and the climate of glaciation was extreme.
Perhaps life in this difficult world has stimulated new forms of cultural innovation.
Or perhaps the mountains of East Kalimantan have become a haven for those fleeing the environmental changes of the LGM, increasing the size of the population and creating social pressures for new forms of communication. intergroup, including art.
In 2014, we revealed the presence of similar rock art in the caves of Sulawesi to Maros, about 40 000 years ago.
Sulawesi is adjacent to Borneo and has never been connected to the neighboring Eurasian continent. This big island is an essential step between Asia and Australia.
Our latest discovery suggests that rock art has spread from Borneo to Sulawesi and to new worlds beyond Eurasia, perhaps arriving with the first peoples to colonize the world. Australia.
Two areas of innovation in Paleolithic rock art
The region of the Ice Age in France and Spain has long been considered the world's center for the development of rock art because of the superb animal paintings known to this region.
But Borneo is the third largest island on the planet, but during most of the glaciation it was connected by the low sea level to the vast continental region of Eurasia – Borneo and Europe were the extremes opposite of this landmbad.
So it seems now that two first rock art provinces existed at the same time in remote corners of Paleolithic Eurasia: one in Indonesia and one in Europe.
A recent study suggests that Neanderthals made rock art in Spain 65,000 years ago, but there is good reason to question this claim.
It is of course possible that the first modern human rock art appeared in Africa and was introduced in Eurasia by the later migrations of our species.
On the other hand, Indonesia and Europe may have been distinct areas of innovation where Ice Age rock art has emerged independently – if so, it is possible that the earliest rock paintings will one day be discovered in Southeast Asia rather than in Europe.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, researcher in archeology and rock art at ARKENAS, contributed to this article.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.
NL Publisher: David Green (@DavidPeterGreen)
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