[ad_1]
On the wall of a cave at the bottom of the jungles of Borneo, we see the image of an animal with a thick body and lean legs, drawn in reddish ocher.
It can be a raw image. But it is also more than 40,000 years old, scientists said Wednesday, making this film the oldest figurative art in the world.
Until now, the oldest known human figures were ivory sculptures discovered in Germany. The scientists estimated that these figurines – horses, birds and people – were at most 40,000 years old.
Researchers found older images created by humans, but these were abstract patterns, such as intersecting lines. The shift to figurative art marked a significant shift in the way people thought about the world around them – and possibly themselves.
The discovery also shows that ancient humans have somehow made the creative transition at about the same time, thousands of miles away from each other.
"It's essentially the same time around the world," said Maxime Aubert, archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and co-author of the report, published in the journal Nature.
Archaeologists have been discovering rock paintings and ancient sculptures for centuries, but it was not until the middle of the 20th century that it became possible to accurately determine their age.
Traces of radioactive carbon are present in some types of art, and scientists measure their age by measuring how long the carbon has broken down.
In the 1950s, radiocarbon dating In the cave of Lascaux, in the south of France, paintings have shown that the images – of horses and other animals – were made 15 500 years ago.
As a result of research, the paintings of Lascaux 18,000 years, making it the oldest artwork known at the time.
Finally, even older works of art appeared. Another French cave, called Chauvet, is decorated with animal drawings that, according to researchers, date back to 37,000 years ago.
In 2003, Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen in Germany discovered ivory figurines, which turned out to be much older: up to 40,000 years old.
For years, these sculptures have distinguished themselves as the oldest works of figurative art on the planet. "It was very lonely for a long time," said Dr. Conard.
Scientists suspected the existence of even older art, but radiocarbon dating has its limitations. Many rock paintings do not have the carbon needed to date them.
In addition, the half-life of radioactive carbon is only 5,730 years. In a sample that is 40,000 years old or older, all the carbon needed to date it has long since disappeared.
In recent years, scientists have developed a new method of dating.
When water trickles down the walls of a cave, she can leave behind a translucent mineral curtain called Flowstone. If a flux stone contains uranium, it will decompose regularly – and at a predictable rate – into thorium.
In 2014, Dr. Aubert and his colleagues dated the age of a molten stone covering the photo of an animal looking like a pig called babirusa in a cave in Sulawesi. They discovered that the image was at least 35,400 years old.
This ancient age stunned Dr. Aubert and his colleagues, and they became eager to use their method on other rock art. Pindi Setiawan, an archaeologist at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, invited Dr. Aubert and his colleagues to try it in Borneo.
Setiawan and Adhi Agus Oktaviana of the Indonesian National Center for Archaeological Research spent years studying drawings in isolated mountain caves.
Getting to the site was not easy. The team had to go up the river by boat to the tropical rainforest, then climb mountains for several days while furrowing a path with machetes.
During two field seasons, researchers visited six caves. They removed fragments of over-stone paints and used the samples to date the minimum age of the works of art below.
[[[[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times Bulletin.]
Scientists have also discovered flow stones under some images. these samples allowed them to determine a maximum age.
The researchers discovered that the earliest works of art in the caves were handmade outlines and red-orange animal designs. The oldest of all was covered with a mass stone formed 40,000 years ago.
This drawing depicts a four-legged animal that Dr. Aubert suspected to be a species of wild cattle called banteng.
Given that the 40,000-year-old flowstone covers the Banteng image, the work must be older, and therefore the oldest figurative art on the planet.
It's hard to tell when people started making these rock drawings, but an intriguing clue comes from a stencil in hand. A stone of flux at the top is 23,600 years old, while another below is 51,800 years old.
By combining the evidence of this stencil and the Banteng image, it is possible that people began to create art in the caves of Borneo between 52,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The new discovery indicates that the inhabitants of Borneo already made figurative images at the same time as the Europeans, or even thousands of years ago.
Now, Dr. Aubert and other researchers are wondering what triggered these bursts of creativity.
One thing is clear: figurative art arrived late in the history of our species.
The oldest fossils of Homo sapiens, found in Morocco, are 300,000 years old. A study conducted last year on the genetic diversity of populations indicates that populations began to diverge from each other in Africa between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago.
Today, every culture is art, and it is likely that men in Africa more than 200,000 years ago had the ability to create it.
But for thousands of generations, there is no evidence that people actually figured. The closest thing is abstract engravings engraved on shells or pieces of ocher.
It is only much later that our species has developed out of Africa. They arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia maybe 70,000 years ago. Researchers suspect modern humans do not arrive in Europe until much later, about 45,000 years ago.
Mr. Aubert hypothesized that, for thousands of years, some hunter-gatherer societies have found places with good food sources or have developed new types of tools, reaching thus denser populations.
In these societies, people may have begun to communicate with images and symbolic images.
"When they come to a certain place and the population increases, they make rock art," said Dr. Aubert.
The first images and figures may have illustrated stories containing information essential to survive in difficult times, said Dr. Conard.
Or maybe the drawings helped to bring people together as a group, encouraging them to cooperate – "a kind of glue to keep these social units together," he said.
If this is the case, ancient figurative art could well end up in other places where primitive man would have reached dense populations, especially in Africa, Asia and Australia.
There are many examples of ancient rock art that have not yet been dated with the latest Flowstone method. "They are just everywhere," said Dr. Aubert.
For the moment, however, he simply wants to return to the caves of Borneo and understand how ancient humans created these remarkable images. Apart from their works of art, no one has found traces of the people who once lived there.
"We want to go and dig," said Dr. Aubert. "We want to know who these people were. We want to know how they lived. We want to know everything. "
Source link
