Cave paintings discovered in Indonesia may be the oldest in existence

The recent discovery of very old cave paintings in Indonesia fuel a challenge to the notion that human creativity originated in Europe.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at Daily Digest News on October 9, 2014

Archaeologists report this week on finding Indonesian cave art that they say dates back at least 40,000 years, likely pre-dating artwork found in European caves that is thought to be at least 30,000 years old. The Indonesian art now stands as the oldest evidence of human creativity.

A Eurocentric view that human creativity originated in the European continent has been undermined by the Indonesian discovery, which is described in a report published in the October 8 issue of the journal Nature. The findings could spawn a veritable ‘gold rush’ to find even older artwork that may lie along the route that early humans migrated from Africa to points east.

The discovery suggests “just what a wealth of undiscovered information there is in Asia”, said Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who was not involved in the discovery. “This paper will likely prompt a hunt.”

The images were first discovered in a limestone cave on the island of Sulawesi in the 1950s. Early attempts to date the images placed them at around 10,000 years old. At the time, archaeologists thought that cave artwork would not generally survive through deterioration much longer than that.

The Indonesian artwork consists of two animal drawings and 12 hand stencils at seven limestone cave sites on the southwestern area of Sulawesi. The researchers dated the images by measuring the radioactive carbon isotopes present in small stalactite-like protrusions called “cave popcorn” which had over the years emerged through the art.

This so-called “U-series dating” was applied to the 14 images and suggested they range in age from 17.4 to 39.9 thousand years. While the method offers high-precision, it can only be used to estimate minimum ages because the artwork could have been present an unknown amount of time before any cave popcorn began to form over it.

The world’s oldest dated cave marking is a red dot found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain, roughly 8,000 miles away from the Indonesian cave. The dot is dated at 40,800 years ago, soon after modern man is thought to have arrived in Europe.