The world's oldest figurative paintings found in the cave of Borneo | Science

Hidden in an isolated cave buried in the inaccessible tropical forests of Indonesian Borneo, a series of rock paintings helps archaeologists and anthropologists rewrite the history of artistic expression. Scientists have discovered that enterprising painters may have been among the very first humans to decorate stone-walled images of the ancient world in which they lived.

The oldest painting of Lubang Jeriji The cave of Saléh on Borneo, the third largest island in the world, is a large wild beast resembling a cattle whose parents can still roam the local forests. The figure has been dated 40,000 years ago and perhaps more, maybe created about 51,800 years ago.

These estimates, recently calculated using radiometric dating, can make painting the oldest known example of figurative rock art – images representing real world objects as opposed to designs. abstract. The figures also provide more evidence of the simultaneous appearance of artistic blossoming among our ancestors, at both ends of the vast Eurasian continent.

Hundreds of ancient images, ranging from abstract drawings to stencils to animals and human figures, have been documented in the remote caves of Indonesian Borneo since scientists first became aware of them in the mid-1990s. other signs of ancient human habitation in this part of the world, they are rarely seen or studied. The Sangkulirang Peninsula – Mangkalihat of Borneo is a land of high towers and limestone cliffs, riddled with caves and covered with thick tropical forests that make journeys arduous and hide local secrets for thousands of years.

Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia, said the efforts to study rock paintings were worthwhile, especially because of the unique connection between here and the past.

"When we do archaeological excavations, we are lucky if we can find pieces of bone or stone tools and, generally, what people have thrown away," says Aubert, lead author of a new study. detailing the paintings of Borneo. "When you look at rock art, it's really an intimate thing. It is a window on the past and you can see the life they have described. It's really as if they've been talking to us for 40,000 years. "

Dating this ancient rock art of Southeast Asia marks a new chapter in the evolving history of where and when our ancestors began to paint their impressions of the outside world . A rhinoceros painted in the French cave of Chauvet was until recently the oldest known example of figurative rock art, dating from about 35,000 to 39,000 years ago. Chauvet and a few other sites have led scientists to believe that such advanced painting originated in Europe. But in 2014, Aubert and his colleagues announced that a rock art depicting stencilled handprints and a large pig-like animal from the same era had been found on the other side of the world on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

"The 2014 document on Sulawesi caused a stir, as it showed that rock art was practiced at the same time in Europe and Southeast Asia," says Paleolithic archaeologist Wil Roebroeks in a statement. email. Roebroeks, from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, added that Aubert's research has "killed eurocentric views of ancient rock art".

The discovery of Borneo complements this previous work and develops a vision of the world of ancient art more and more vast and intriguing, proposing as many new questions as answers.

Aubert and his colleagues were able to determine when the ancient artists of Borneo practiced their craft by dating the calcite crusts, known as the "popcorn cave," which water infiltration slowly created on the summit. art. The team has aged these deposits by measuring the amount of uranium and thorium in the samples. Since uranium decays to thorium at a known rate, this uranium series analysis can be used to calculate the age of a sample. And since the paintings are under these crusts, they must be older than the deposits. The Indonesian National Center for Archeology Research (ARKENAS) and the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) also contributed to the study published today in Nature.

Even though the dating of uranium suggests that these figures are the oldest known example of this art in the world, Aubert is even more interested in the striking similarities between the rock art styles of Borneo and those that we find throughout Europe. In fact, two styles of painting found in Indonesian Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave – superimposed on each other by peoples who frequented the same cave at perhaps 20,000 years apart – also appear at about the same time at more than 20000 km in Western Europe.

The first model, which began between 52,000 and 40,000 years ago, uses red and orange tints and includes hand stencils and paintings of large animals that lived in the area. A second distinct style appeared around 20,000 years ago. He uses purple or ripe colors, and his hand stencils, sometimes connected by branch-shaped lines, have internal decorations.

1300 years ago, the rock art of Borneo had undergone another significant evolution: it began to represent the human world. "We see small human figures. They wear headdresses, sometimes dance or hunt, and that's amazing, "says Aubert.

"It's more of a motive than we can see now. We have very old paintings in Europe and Southeast Asia, and not only did they appear at the same time, but they seem to evolve simultaneously, "said Aubert. "The second distinct style appeared at the time of the last glacial maximum and could therefore be related to climate. We simply do not know. "

Rock art painters could have developed simultaneously at more than one place, suggests Roebroeks. Alternatively, as he wrote in a 2014 Nature In this essay, rock art could have been "an integral part of the cultural repertoire of the colonization of modern man, from Western Europe to Southeast Asia and beyond".

"We can only speculate on the more or less contemporary" emergence "of rock art in Western Eurasia, and on the other extreme of the distribution of modern man, insular Southeast Asia", says Roebroeks.

The idea that rock art was an integral part of modern human culture from the beginning seems self-evident for the archaeologist Paul Pettitt of the University of Durham, who states that a wide range of evidence supports the interpretation that non-figurative art evolved in Africa 75,000 years ago. there is or sooner.

"It could have been conceived as a way of decorating the body with specific meanings," he explains in an e-mail, "and included shell jewelery known from the north and south of the continent 100,000 years ago. already. "Artistic expressions" had developed to include the use of red ochres and engraved signs on blocks and ocher stones of 75,000 [years ago] and decoration of 65,000 on water tanks in ostrich eggshell. If we assume that this repertoire has left Africa with some of the oldest dispersions of Homo sapiensperhaps on their bodies, this could explain the persistence of a form of art that, at least 40,000 years ago, had come to spread the body, and things that they were closely associated with walls of caves and rock shelters, "he said. said.

But even if we could understand the entire history of primitive human art, we might still miss an even bigger picture.

A study dating back to 2018 describes Spanish rock art so old that it would have been created more than 20 000 years before the arrival of modern humans in the region, which means that the artists were to be Neanderthals. Although the dots, lines and stencils in hand are not the same type of figurative art as that of Borneo or Chauvet, the images suggest that artistic expression was part of the Neanderthal toolbox ago. at least 64,000 years old.

Roebroeks warns that scientists should be reluctant to infer that certain times or places are key to the emergence of a particular cultural behavior, simply because their testimony is lacking in other times or places. As evidenced by the astonishingly ancient dates recently attributed to the Neanderthal rock art, or the emergence of Pleistocene rock art outside of Europe in Indonesia, these assumptions often rest on the Absence of comparable phenomena in localities or neighboring periods.

It is not because we have not found them that it does not exist. "One of the lessons we can learn from studies by Aubert and his colleagues on the rock art of Sulawesi and Borneo is that such reasoning methods can be seriously flawed."

The prehistoric art may have been created in the distant past, but the future will likely bring surprising discoveries that will transform our vision of human artistic expression tens of thousands of years after the drying paint.