|
| 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. |
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.
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."
