Scientists Stunned By 40,000 Year Old Paintings On Indonesian Island, Rivals Oldest European Ice Age Art (Video)

paintings 2This is compatible in age with the oldest known rock art from Europe, long seen as the birthplace of ‘Ice Age’ cave painting and home to the most sophisticated artworks in early human cultural history.

These new findings challenge long-cherished views about the origins of cave art, one of the most fundamental developments in our evolutionary past, according to Maxime Aubert from Griffith University, the dating expert who co-led the study.

“It is often assumed that Europe was the centre of the earliest explosion in human creativity, especially cave art, about 40 thousand years ago’, said Aubert, ‘but our rock art dates from Sulawesi show that at around the same time on the other side of the world people were making pictures of animals as remarkable as those in the Ice Age caves of France and Spain.”

The prehistoric images are from limestone caves near Maros in southern Sulawesi, a large island east of Borneo. They consist of stencilled outlines of human hands – made by blowing or spraying paint around hands pressed against rock surfaces – and paintings of primitive fruit-eating pigs called babirusas (‘pig-deer’).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *