STUDY Contemporary artists of the Chauvet caves drew in Indonesian …
Revolution in History (very distant) s. There are 40,000 years in Asia, men already decorated their caves with paintings and Europe. A discovery that overturns the commonly accepted notion that wall art is first appeared in Western Europe.
In studying the limestone caves of Maros, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists has established that a human hand painted with a negative stencil technique dating to 39,900 years ago at least.
Another work, the very realistic representation of a pig “babirusa” with its paws and tail, painted with red pigments in the same cave, who are at least 35,400 years. We know that this is a female because she does not wear large curved canines of “babirusa” male, nicknamed the “pig-deer”. This dating makes an early figurative paintings in the world.
New method for dating
To achieve these results, the researchers, who published their study Wednesday in the British journal Nature , used the method of dating by uranium-thorium. “It is often assumed that Europe was the center of the first explosion of human creativity, especially with cave art, there are about 40,000 years,” said one of the authors of the study, Maxime Aubert Australian Griffith University. “But our dating of cave art Sulawesi show that about the same time at the other side of the world, men were making paintings of animals as remarkable as those caves of France and Spain during Ice Age, “he adds.
The first known world art is painting a red disk discovered in the El Castillo cave in northern Spain and dated to at least 40,800 years. A hand stencil found on this site at least 37,300 years. The oldest figurative paintings found in Europe is a rhino Chauvet (France), which would be between 35,300 and 38,800 years.
Located in the south of the island, caves adorned Karst Maros are known since the 1950s but it was long believed that their paintings were less than 10,000 years due to the rapid erosion in this tropical region which suggested that they could not be very old. In fact, they are much less well preserved than in Europe and they now degrade at high speed.
Different scenarios
“It is possible that the cave art has appeared independently at about the same time at both ends of the geographical distribution of early modern humans, “notes the study.
An alternative scenario would be that” wall art was widely practiced by the first Homo sapiens to leave Africa tens of thousands of years ago. ” Painted animals found in the caves of Chauvet and Maros “then would draw their deep roots outside Europe and Indonesia,” the researchers added. In this case, we must expect further discoveries in other parts of the world, including Australia, they said.
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