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.

Colononization of Madeira was years ago

The man could have been in the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira 400 years before it was colonized by Portugal. This was revealed by the dating of ancient bones of a house mouse found in a fossil site of Ponta de São Lourenço. 

According to the study, led by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, house mice would have arrived on the island before the year 1036, most likely transported in a boat, as the note of CSIC has recently explained. The article also suggests that the introduction of this species would have led to an ecological catastrophe. 

Until now it had documented the arrival of man-they Macaronesia Atlantic north-five archipelagos in two successive waves: 

• Aboriginal, limited to the Canary Islands for two millennia.
• Colonial, from the fourteenth century onwards, which occurred in all the islands of the archipelagos. 

According to historical data, the Portuguese took possession of Madeira officially in 1419, when colonization began. 

The research team, which also included Germans and the University of La Laguna scientists analyzed two samples of bones found in Ponta de São Lourenço. 

The small size of the first date it prevented, but the second one has been dated between 900 and 1030, which is the earliest testimony of the presence of mice in Madeira. "The current populations of house mouse Madeira show similarities in mitochondrial DNA with those of Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with those of Portugal. Therefore, this second sample analyzed leads to think that the Vikings were led home to the island mouse. However, it is a conclusion that must be ratified with new morphological and genetic studies of fossil Ponta de São Lourenço, since to date there are no historical references to Macaronesia Vikings travel" says CSIC researcher Josep Antoni Alcover, Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (CSIC mixed and the University of the Balearic Islands). 

Apart from modifying the historical data, the new dating extends the time frame in which the most significant ecological changes occurred on the island. According to investigators, the first man would have triggered the extinction of endemic bird species in the archipelago of Madeira (consisting of Madeira and Porto Santo). 

Once seated, the population of mice, which hardly differs from the current house mice, have reached a high density because of its reproductive potential and the absence of rats. Their predatory activity would have focused on the eggs and chicks of small and medium birds such as quail or rails. The bones obtained from Holocene deposits indicate that at least two thirds of the endemic birds and two non-endemic species became extinct. They would also have played a significant role in enabling the prosperity of other predators such as owls. "The introduction of the mice probably led to an ecological catastrophe, based on the extinction of endemic birds and changing the ecology of the island 400 years earlier than previously thought" CSIC researcher highlights.

13,300 year old spear made of woolly rhinoceros horn found on Arctic island

The spear tip. Picture: The Siberian Times 

Studies on the intriguing rhino spear are still ongoing but this remarkable find seen as having considerable archeological significance.

The spear tip, almost 90cm in length and seemingly still sharp enough to kill, was found on the island of Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, off the northern coast of Siberia, as researchers hunted for remains of woolly mammoths.

If all the information is confirmed, it will be the northernmost point where a human implement was found, three degrees latitude further north than we had known before.

Previously ancient tools were found at a site on the Yana River, on the Siberian mainland, some 380 km to the south.

Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island on the map. Picture: Russian Geographical Society

This find helps the understanding of how far north people penetrated in the Paleolithic Era.

The weapon was dated as being 13,300 years old after being sent for analysis to Groningen University in the Netherlands. Rhinos in Siberia died out around 12,000 years ago.

The spear is also in one-piece, so it could be made only from the horn of a big, mature rhino. Woolly rhinos were rather dangerous animals, and hunting them could be regarded as a huge trophy.

Previously, woolly rhinoceros horn has been seen as a component in the construction of ancient spears in Siberia, for example in the coupling of a stone tip to the shaft.

The woolly rhino's horn is rather hard, but flexible at the same time. It consists of keratin - a substance that makes up our hair and nails. Deer horn or cow horn, by contrast, consist of bone substance.

Replica of a woolly rhino created by Remie Bakke

One possibility that needs scientific evidence is that it was used to kill mammoths which, like the woolly rhinos, are long extinct. The spear suggests these early Siberians were accomplished hunters.

At the Yana River site, dating back approximately 30,000 years, were found such artifacts as axes, stone scrapers, worked quartz crystals, tools made of wolf bone, and spear foreshafts made of mammoth tusk and rhinoceros horn.