Wall paintings recently discovered in an Indonesian cave are at least 40,000 years old, meaning that they are the oldest artworks ever created by humans, most likely pre-dating the famous wall paintings currently considered the oldest in the world, Nature reports. The new findings undermine the current Eurocentric views of the origins of human creativity.
According to Alistair Pike, archaeologist at the University of Southampton (UK), the discovery might trigger a veritable “gold rush” – a search for even older evidence on the path of the human migration from Africa to the East. There might be a “wealth of undiscovered information there is in Asia”, Pike says. He was the one who identified the cave art currently considered the oldest in Europe, but he was not involved in the current project.
Nobody has tried to accurately determine the age of the Indonesian cave art, even after the uranium-thorium dating method, until now. The paint itself on the cave walls can’t be dated, though, but the calcium carbonate layers covering the paintings can. The researches have dated several paintings – a number of 12 stencils of human hands and two animal images, and they found that the oldest stencil was at least 39,900 years old, 2,000 years older than the oldest one found in Europe. The hand prints on the cave walls are similar to those found in Europe, but the animal paintings represent the local fauna, and are stylistically different. The European animal paintings look like they were drawn using fingers, while the Indonesian ones look almost like being painted using a brush.
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There are two different theories for the evolution of such artwork – one of them claims it has evolved independently in Indonesia, and the other one supposes that early humans leaving Africa already had the capability to create such images, and have carried it to several areas.