Ancient Indonesian cave paintings rewrite history of human art

[Buster's Uncle]

Ancient Indonesian cave paintings rewrite history of human art
Reuters
By Will Dunham  22 hours ago



A Babirusa ("pig-deer") and a hand stencil are pictured in this undated handout image provided by Kinez Riza. REUTERS/Kinez Riza/Handout via Reuters



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Prehistoric paintings at least 40,000 years old that depict animals - including one known as a "pig-deer" - and the outline of human hands in seven caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting the history of art.

Scientists said on Wednesday they used a highly precise method to determine the antiquity of the paintings. They found the artwork was comparable in age to the oldest-known rock art from Europe, long thought to be the cradle of the early human cultural achievement embodied by cave painting.

"It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centrepiece of a symbolic explosion in early human artistic activity such as cave painting and other forms of image-making, including figurative art, around 40,000 years ago," said dating expert Maxime Aubert of Australia's Griffith University.

The fact that people in Sulawesi were doing the same things as contemporaries in Europe indicates cave art may have emerged independently at about the same time around the world, including Europe and Southeast Asia, added archaeologist Thomas Sutikna of Australia's University of Wollongong.

"Rock art is one of the indicators of an abstract mind of the past human, the onset of what we might consider to be one of the hallmarks of 'modern' humans," Sutikna added.

The study focussed on 14 cave paintings: 12 human hand stencils and two naturalistic animal depictions, one showing an animal called a babirusa, or "pig-deer," and the other showing what probably is a pig.

They were painted in limestone caves near Maros in southern Sulawesi, a large island east of Borneo.

Most of the artwork was created with a pigment called red ochre to produce red- and mulberry-coloured paintings. The art's existence had been known for decades, but its age had never been determined. Some experts estimated it was maybe 10,000 years old.

The scientists used a method based on the radioactive decay of tiny quantities of uranium in small mineral growths dubbed "cave popcorn" that formed on some of the paintings.

The oldest Sulawesian artwork, a hand outline at least about 40,000 years ago, was comparable in age to the world's oldest-known rock art image, a red dot from Spain's El Castillo site.

The ages for the animal paintings at the famed Chauvet and Lascaux cave sites in France are more recent - between about 26,000 and 18,000 years old - than Sulawesi's figurative animals, which are at least 35,000 years old. The babirusa image represents the oldest-known, reliably dated figurative depiction, Aubert said.

The artists made hand images by blowing or spraying paint around hands pressed against rock surfaces.

"Archaeologists love to say things like 'ability X is what makes us human,' but in the case of the origins of art they are probably right. Our species is compelled to make art. And in one form or another, it is inherent in almost everything we do," said archaeologist Adam Brumm, also of Griffith University.

The study appears in the journal Nature.

(Reporting by Will Dunham. Editing by Andre Grenon)


http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-indonesian-cave-paintings-rewrite-history-human-art-221721214.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Study: Asian cave drawings as old as European ones
Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN  October 8, 2014 1:10 PM



This undated handout photo provided by Nature Magazine shows stencils of hands in a cave in Indonesia. Ancient cave drawings in Indonesia are as old as famous prehistoric art in Europe, according to a new study that shows our ancestors were drawing all over the world 40,000 years ago. And it hints at an even earlier dawn of creativity in modern humans, going back to Africa, than scientists had thought. (AP Photo/Kinez Riza, Nature Magazine)



WASHINGTON (AP) — Ancient cave drawings in Indonesia are as old as famous prehistoric art in Europe, according to a new study that shows our ancestors were drawing all over the world 40,000 years ago.

And it hints at an even earlier dawn of creativity in modern humans, going back to Africa, than scientists had thought.

Archaeologists calculated that a dozen stencils of hands in mulberry red and two detailed drawings of an animal described as a "pig-deer" are between 35,000 to 40,000 years old, based on levels of decay of the element uranium. That puts the art found in Sulawesi, southeast of Borneo, in the same rough time period as drawings found in Spain and a famous cave in France.

And one of the Indonesian handprints, pegged as at least 39,900 years old, is now the oldest hand stencil known to science, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

These are more than 100 Indonesian cave drawings that have been known since 1950. In 2011, scientists noticed some strange outcroppings — called "cave popcorn" — on the drawings. Those mineral deposits would make it possible to use the new technology of uranium decay dating to figure out how old the art is. So they tested the cave popcorn that had grown over the stencils that would give a minimum age. It was near 40,000 years.

"Whoa, it was not expected," recalled study lead author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia.



This undated handout photo provided by Nature Magazine shows stencils of hands in a cave in Indonesia. Ancient cave drawings in Indonesia are as old as famous prehistoric art in Europe, according to a new study that shows our ancestors were drawing all over the world 40,000 years ago. And it hints at an even earlier dawn of creativity in modern humans, going back to Africa, than scientists had thought. (AP Photo/Kinez Riza, Nature Magazine)


Looking at the paintings, the details on the animal drawings are "really, really well-made," Aubert said in a phone interview from Jakarta, Indonesia. "Then when you look at it in context that it's really 40,000 years old, it's amazing."

Paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York, who wasn't part of the study, called this an important discovery that changes what science thought about early humans and art.

Before this discovery, experts had a Europe-centric view of how, when and where humans started art, Aubert said. Knowing when art started is important because "it kind of defines us as a species," he said.

Because the European and Asian art are essentially the same age, it either means art developed separately and simultaneously in different parts of the world or "more likely that when humans left Africa 65,000 years ago they were already evolved with the capacity to make paintings," Aubert said. Ancient art hasn't been found much in Africa because the geology doesn't preserve it.

Shea and others lean toward the earlier art theory.

"What this tells us is that when humans began moving out of Africa they were not all that different from us in terms of their abilities to use art and symbol," Shea said in an email. "Inasmuch as many of us would have difficulty replicating such paintings, they may even have been our superiors in this respect."

___

Online:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature


http://news.yahoo.com/study-asian-cave-drawings-old-european-ones-171024954.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Confirmed: The Oldest Known Art in the World Is Spray-Painted Graffiti
The Atlantic
By Megan Garber  October 8, 2014 4:36 PM






Sixty years ago, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a group of archaeologists discovered a series of paintings spread across 100 limestone caves. The images—rendered, by the time of their discovery, in sepias of varying saturations—featured stencil-like outlines of human hands and stick-legged animals in motion; they were in appearance, at least, quite similar to the cave paintings that had already been discovered, and made famous, in Spain and France.

The paintings were proto-graffiti. They were early versions of that car window in Titanic. They were humans, making their mark.

They were also, obviously, old. But they were not, it was thought, oooooold-old. They couldn't have been created, their finders figured, much more than 10,000 years ago. Had they been any older, everyone assumed, they would have faded away in the humid tropical air.

But you know what they say about assumptions. According to a paper published today in the journal Nature, those paintings, etched into those caves, are much older than those first scientists had thought. Tens of thousands of years older, in fact. So old that they are now thought to be the oldest known specimens of art in the world. If art is one of the things that make us human … then it seems we've been human for even longer than we've realized.

The Sulawesi dating isn't just a scientific discovery or a cultural revelation; it's also a political point.

That it took us so long to make that realization, though, is a reminder of some other things that make us human: technological limitation, resource limitation, cultural myopia. It's long been assumed that the oldest human paintings were created in Europe, in the caves of France and Spain. That's an assumption that has political implications as well as scientific ones. "The truth of it was, no one had really tried to date it," the Smithsonian's Matt Tocheri told NPR of the Sulawesi find.

That wasn't because we lacked the tools to do the dating. While the Sulawesi paint itself can't be accurately dated, what we've long been able to do is to estimate the age of the rocky bumps—calcium carbonate, more commonly and more delightfully known as "cave popcorn"—that now cover it. Uranium-thorium dating takes advantage of the decay rate of uranium as it turns into thorium to estimate, to a high degree of accuracy, the age of the rock in question. It allows scientists to determine an age—a minimum age—for the paintings that cover the cave walls.

Using that method, the Griffith University professor Maxime Aubert and his team were able to determine that the Sulawesi paintings are, at minimum, 39,900 years old. Which makes their minimum age at least 2,000 years older than the minimum age of the oldest European cave art. (While the paintings are strikingly similar in content—human hands, animals teetering on stick-like appendages—they are also strikingly different in style. The Indonesian images "look ‘line-y,’ almost like brush strokes," Alistair Pike, the archaeologist who identified what was preciously considered the world’s oldest cave art, in Europe, told Nature. Early European images, on the other hand, "look dabbed, almost like finger paint.")

All of which make the Sulawesi dating not just a scientific discovery, and not just a cultural revelation, but also something of a political point. "It allows us to move away from the view that Europe was special," Aubert told Nature. "There was some idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings." The discovery of proto-art in Indonesia—the flecked and frozen outlines of the hands of unknown humans—negates that idea, scientifically. "Now," Aubert says, "we can say that’s not true.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/humanitys-earliest-art-was-spray-painted-graffiti/381259/