In a hidden valley on an Indonesian island, there is a cave decorated with the oldest figurative art ever seen by modern eyes.
According to a study published in Science Advances on Wednesday, the vivid depiction of a wild boar, set out and filled in with mulberry pattern, is at least 45,500 years old. It was discovered deep inside a cave called Leang Tedongnge in December 2017 during an archaeological investigation led by Basran Burhan, a graduate student at Griffith University and co-author of the new research. The animal in the painting looks like the warty pig, a species that still lives on the island of Sulawesi where the cave is today.
Sulawesi has been considered by some experts to be home to the earliest known representative cave art in the world. A fascinating scene elsewhere on the island, which displays hybrids of human animals, was found to be at least 43,900 years old, the same team reported in a 2019 study.
These examples of cave art, along with another pig figure spotted in a cave further south by Adhi Agus Oktavhiana, a graduate student at Griffith University and co-author of the study, point to the rich cultures that are on the Indonesian islands live. The discoveries also open up a debate about whether the artists could be Homo sapiens, or members of another extinct human species.
The Leang Tedongnge site is only about 40 kilometers from Makassar, a bustling city with about 1.5 million people. But the cave remained virtually untouched because it is so challenging to reach.
“Getting there is a difficult hike along a rough forest path that winds through mountainous terrain and ends in a narrow cave passage, which is the only entrance to the valley,” said Adam Brumm, also an archaeologist at the Griffith -university, and an associate said. author of the study. ‘The valley is only available during the dry season; during the wet season, the valley floor is completely flooded and residents have to drive around on excavating canoes. ”
Dr. Brumm praised local scientists and others for making the discovery on the cave site possible.
After discovering the pig painting, they used the uranium series to determine the minimum age, and they reached 45,500 years. But it is possible that the painting may be thousands of years older because the technique only determines the age of a mineral deposit, the speleotem, formed on the cave walls.
The question of who made the paintings is still shrouded in mystery.
Human skeletal remains of 45,500 years have never been found in Sulawesi, so it is not clear that the artists were anatomically modern humans. The islands now called Indonesia have long been inhabited by various hominins – the wider family to which people belong. Some of these hominin remains date ‘more than a million years old’, said Rasmi Shoocongdej, an archaeologist at Silpakorn University in Thailand, who was not involved in the study.
Dr. Brumm and his colleagues assume that the painters were modern people, “given the refinement of this early performance artwork.” In addition, the ancient paintings share features with prehistoric art made by humans elsewhere in the world, including the presence of handprints and the use of the ‘distorted perspective’, in which animals are painted in profile and front views.
Dr Brumm says he believes it is only a matter of time before human remains of this century are found in archaeological excavations in the region.
João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona who was not involved in the study, disagrees with the team’s assumption that modern humans created the paintings. As co-author of a 2018 study suggesting that Neanderthals left non-figurative art on the walls of Spanish caves, he thinks another extinct human species made the images possible.
“An anatomically modern human being is an anatomical definition,” he said. “It has nothing to do with cognition, intelligence or behavior.”
Dr. Zilhão added: “There is no evidence on the anatomy of the people who did these things.”
While it is easy to concentrate on the claim that these are the oldest prehistoric images still found of humans, Margaret Conkey, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, said they have the “much broader implications” of overshadow the discovery.
What stood out from the perspective of the study was the ‘important contribution to understanding how people can stay connected to each other’ in the prehistoric Sulawesi, and ‘how they create social worlds through material and visual manifestations’.
While the new study uses the term ‘oldest’, Dr Brumm and his colleagues expect to find images in Sulawesi with even more advanced ages.
“We think there is much older rock art and other evidence of human habitation in Sulawesi and on other islands in the eastern part of Indonesia, known as the Welsh archipelago, the gateway to mainland Australia,” said Dr. Brumm said.
Unfortunately, time is of the essence: Indonesia’s cave art is rapidly deteriorating, giving rise to the sad prospect that many of the oldest paintings on earth could disappear before being rediscovered.
“We have documented this phenomenon at almost every rock art site in the region, and the monitoring by our colleagues at the local cultural heritage agency indicates that the art is being peeled off at an alarming rate,” said Dr. Brumm said. “This is very worrying, and given the current situation, the end result is likely to be the eventual destruction of this Indonesian art of the ice age, perhaps even within our lifetime.”