2024-07-03 19:25:51
4 minutes.
A team of scientists from Australia and Indonesia have confirmed the discovery of what is the world’s oldest narrative art. The cave painting, from some 51,200 years old and located on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, it shows three human figures interacting with a wild pig.
Dating techniques have shown that the drawing was 5,700 years longer than expected, which meant a revolution for the field of archaeology. The discovery has shown that the depiction of human-like figures and animals and the use of composite scenes in art were much earlier than previously thought.
Details of the study have been published in the journal naturealready included in the years 2014 y 2019 similar items of cave paintings on the same island, and he even said that some of them were mythological representations.
Sulawesi, rock museum
The paintings in the karst caves on the island of Sulawesi not only bear evidence of the presence of people in the archipelago located between Asia and Australia-New Guinea during the Paleolithic. At the same time, it contains one of the oldest examples of figurative rock art in the world.
“These types of scenes in Paleolithic art are very rare,” says the director of the Prehistoric Caves of Cantabria, Roberto Ontañon,” and, furthermore, it is contrasted with other cave paintings located elsewhere, showing that along his journey from Africa to Asia They shaped their own culture and artistic style“.
In 2014, a team of scientists from Australia and Indonesia discovered that paintings found in seven caves in southwest Sulawesi were between 39,900 and 17,400 years old. At that time, they already began to see that they could be older.
In 2020, another team of Australians announced that a hunting scene found in caves on the island was 43,900 years old and a year later, they found a drawing of a glandular pig painted in caves in the Maros-Pangkep region from 45,500 years ago shin. At the time, it was considered the oldest figurative rock art in history. Now, new, more accurate dating using new techniques suggests that the island paintings are thousands of years older.
“Remains of ceramics with geometric motifs from more than 100,000 years ago can already be found in Africa, as well as paintings that go back to about 40,000 years ago in Europe,” Ontañón emphasized. “What these studies allow us to do is to establish a way to find out whether there were signs of the expression of symbolic thoughts in humans before and whether, in addition, started earlier in Asia than in Europe“, Add.
New dating techniques
To carry out the study, the staff of Griffith University led Mr. Aubert, has employed another dating method called laser ablation uranium array imaging. The process seeks to re-evaluate some of the rock paintings in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi to re-determine the longevity of the paintings.
At the time, the researchers analyzed a hunting scene with the new method, dating back to at least 43,900 years, and the painting is estimated to be at least approx. 48,000 years old.
“This new method, which affects the sample using a laser, allows for a great resolution of the dates, much more accurate than other methods like Carbon-14,” says Ontañón.
For the authors, the conclusions of this study are to disprove the general theory about how the representation of human-like figures and the use of narrative composition through scenes in art did not become relatively common until between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene.
“What the research team proposes is that those who took the pictures are of a modern species, A wise man“Says Ontañón. “Until recently it was thought that this process was much later, around 40,000 years ago with the first settlements in Australia, which has been updated. with these new techniques“he says.
In addition, the team argues that the current method used is faster and more cost-effective, as well as being less destructive to the artwork and providing greater accuracy.
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