Indonesian cave art rewrites the prehistory books
Hand markings and paintings of wild animals date back 40,000 years, refuting long-held belief that Europe was the birthplace of art
Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known, analysis has shown.
The work reveals that rather than Europe being at the heart of an explosion of creative brilliance when modern humans arrived from Africa, the early settlers of Asia were creating their own artworks at the same time or earlier.
"Europeans can't exclusively claim to have been the first to develop an abstract mind anymore," said Anthony Dosseto, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. "They need to share this, at least, with the early inhabitants of Indonesia."
The rock art was originally discovered in caves on the island of Sulawesi in the 1950s, but was thought to be less than 10,000 years old because scientists thought older paintings could not survive in a tropical climate.
But fresh analysis of the pictures by an Australian-Indonesian team has stunned researchers by dating one hand marking to at least 39,900 years old, and two paintings of animals - a pig-deer or babirusa, and another animal, probably a wild pig - to at least 35,400 and 35,700 years ago.