35,000-year-old drawing found in Indonesia challenges idea that art began in Europe

Around 40,000 years ago, early Europeans were the first to begin smearing pigment on walls, or so the story goes. But now paintings of animals and hand stencils on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have been identified as just as old as their European equivalents, A group of indonesian and australian archeologist published last Wednesday in Nature the founding of 39.000 years old prehistorical drawns.

Dated rock art from Leang Lompoa

There are animal pictures and hand printings. C14 probes had detected some strokes that are capable to compete in ancient with a large red dot of 40.800 years old found in the cave El Castillo, in Cantabria (Spain).

The similar dating of two different paintings separate by more than 13 thousand kilometres suggest new questions about how appeared the first human art manifestations.

It is though that the cave art maybe appeared independently in modern human populations in Europe and Asian Southeast. But also is possible that it was a common practice in the first humans who left Africa many years before.

Nevertheless, this probes only precisate the minimun age of the paintings, so they could be more ancient.

There are 12 hand tracks and two animal figures, in seven different caves. The ancienst drawn is a human hand track. Is also important the drawn of a babirusa (local mammal known as a pig-deer). A barely perceptible red line below may represent the ground that it is walking on. Next to this painting, which adorns the ceiling of a 4-metre-high cave, is a human hand stencil, made by pressing a hand against the rock and spraying wet pigments over it.

Analysing the uranium in these deposits revealed that the babirusa image is at least 35,400 years old, meaning it is among the earliest identified figurative paintings in the world. The hand stencil is at least 39,900 years old (see picture above, top right), making it the oldest example of this common ancient art form ever found 

Dated rock art from Leang Timpuseng.

The babirusa image, plus a painting of what could be a pig that is at least 35,700 years old, are likely to fuel the debate over how art evolved. Some say simple dots and lines came first, followed by outline representations of the world and, eventually, complex murals. Others think that art's development was not so linear, and that sophisticated murals, possibly including those at France's Chauvet cave, date right back to the earliest stages.

 Ancient stencils (Image: Kinez Riza)

Hand prints could be a signature, or might be early signs of mysticism. Paul Pettitt of Durham University in the UK is elaborating another hypothesis. "To me this is beginning to look like a plausible scenario for how humans invented figurative art," he says. "It's not so surprising that our ancestors would place this important natural tool on a wall and trace it. It will then occur to these people that they have created an outline... and that if a hand can be represented in outline, so can anything else."

If Pettitt is right, the hand stencil was how our ancestors discovered that a three-dimensional object could be represented with a two-dimensional line.