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WASHINGTON – Scientists have found the oldest known example of animal drawing: a red silhouette of a beast resembling a bull on the wall of an Indonesian cave.
The sketch is at least 40,000 years old, a little more than the same thing. animal paintings found in famous caves in France and Spain. Until a few years ago, experts thought that Europe was the place where our ancestors started drawing animals and other characters.
But the age of the drawing reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, as well as previous discoveries in Southeast Asia, suggest that figurative drawing appeared on both continents at about the same time.
The new discoveries fuel discussions about whether historical or evolutionary events have motivated this almost simultaneous "explosion of human creativity," said lead author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in New York. Australia.
The remote limestone caves of Borneo are known to contain prehistoric drawings since the 1990s. To reach them, Aubert and his team used machetes to split the thick jungle in a green corner of the island.
Wearing their helmets on the helmets of miners to illuminate the darkness, they walked and traveled miles of caves adorned with hundreds of ancient motifs, looking for works of art that could be dated. They needed to find specific mineral deposits on the drawings to determine their age with a technology that measures the degradation of the uranium element.
"Most paintings we can not really taste," Aubert said.
Aubert and his fellow researchers reported in 2014 rock art from the neighboring Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They date stencils by hand, created by blowing a red dye through a tube to capture the outline of a hand pressed against the rock almost 40,000 years ago.
Now, with Borneo 's rock art, scientists are able to construct a rough timeline of art development in the region. In addition to the bull, which measures approximately 5 feet wide, they also dated the stencils in the hands of red and purple colors and cave paintings of human scenes.
After large animal drawings and stencils, "it seems that the focus has been on the representation of the human world," Aubert said.
Some 14,000 years ago, cave dwellers began drawing human figures regularly, doing things like dancing and hunting, often wearing large headdresses. A similar transition in the subjects of rock art has occurred in the caves of Europe.
"It's very cool, from a human point of view," said Peter Veth, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, who did not participate in the study. . "People have adopted similar strategies in different environments as they have become more modern."
The island of Borneo was still connected to mainland Southeast Asia when the first figurative drawings were made about 40,000 years ago – which is also the time when the first modern humans arrived in Europe. The first animal drawings in the French cave of Chauvet date from about 33,500 to 37,000 years ago.
That new waves of people emigrating from Africa have brought the skills of figurative rock painting or that these arts appeared later, remains to be determined. Scientists only have a partial record of world rock art. The first cave rock carvings were discovered in Africa and include abstract patterns, such as hatching, dating back about 73,000 years.
The next stage of research in Indonesia will include excavations to better understand the authors of these paintings. Some sites containing human bones, prehistoric jewelry and remains of small animals have already been identified.
As for the red bull, its meaning remains a mystery.
"We think it was not just food for them – it meant something special," Aubert said.
