“When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish — it seems like a message, we can feel a connection with it.”
The cave painting, discovered in Indonesia, seems insignificant on the face of it. As the journal Nature revealed late last week, though, it is a lot more than that.
At a cursory glance the painting depicts two wild pigs and four small, early relatives of the water buffalo — and, most intriguingly to palaeoanthropologists, eight human-like stick figures brandishing what appear to be spears.
What the painting is meant to represent is unclear — is it a hunt, and if so, are the early humans hunting the animals or the other way around? — but what is clear is the painting’s age.
First discovered in 2017 by an Indonesian cave diver named Hamrullah — many Indonesians prefer to go by a single name — the cave painting is now believed — “likely,” researchers say — to be the oldest known story told through pictures.
We’re talking some 44,000 years, which would make the painting more than twice as old as the famous Lascaux cave art in France, which is estimated to be some 19,000 years old.
The Lascaux cave art depicts, among other things, a bison charging a bird-headed man, which suggests early humans did not have it all their own way when it came to foraging for food.
The past year has seen many such discoveries, and not just in one place but all over the world. Early art has been found on every continent but Antarctica, and the findings have the potential to completely reshape the picture of our human journey.
Far from being chastened by getting it wrong in the past, most palaeontologists are excited by the prospect of new discoveries leading to more, and better, knowledge of how we became who we are today.
Caves are a perfect depository for ancient art because they’re sealed off from the outside world in large part, away from the corroding effects of sunlight and outside air. The Lascaux caves were closed to tourism, shortly after their discovery in the mid 20th century, because it was found that tourists exhaling carbon dioxide were corroding cave art that had survived thousands of years. In his 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the German filmmaker was one of the last human beings allowed to see — and film — the Chauvet Cave in southern France, home to cave art dating back some 32,000 years, until the Indonesia find, the oldest human-painted images yet discovered.
The Indonesian find is unique because, quite apart from its age, it was found in Sulawesi’s Maros-Pangkep region, an area where, millions of years ago, underground rivers cut through the limestone to form a maze of caverns, hidden from view until only recently. The find suggests there may be countless other underground cave systems throughout the world that haven’t been discovered yet.
Early humans were reluctant to paint human
faces on their portraits, despite the detailed facial expressions of many of the wild animals they painted, but what they did do was leave hand stencils, which may have been the artists’ signature or a statement of claim. By studying the hand stencils, palaeoanthropologists have been able to determine the size and other characteristics of early humans.
Previously unknown examples of early human art has been discovered everywhere Australia to the Balkans during the past calendar year. The finds do not disprove the generally accepted conclusion that the very first humans migrated out of Africa, but they do suggests those early migrations were much more widespread than originally believed.
The science of dating cave paintings is exactly that, a science, and not idle speculation. As with much of our knowledge of science, recent breakthroughs in technology have greatly enhanced our collective understanding of what happens in the world, and why.
Dating cave paintings involves a number of different, unrelated methods, mixed together and combined much like an artist painting a canvas. Palaeoanthropologists examine and identify specific minerals that have grown over the cave art over time, minerals that include trace amounts of radioactive uranium that decays and becomes thorium. The older the deposit, the more thorium it will have relative to uranium. Minerals form over the pigment layer used in painting; the process of dating the painting is similar but not identical to the way art historians determine forgeries from originals in the high-stakes world of art collecting.
The scenes depicted in early cave paintings may seem simplistic and obvious to those of us living in the modern age, but they’re anything but to the archaeologists and behavioural scientists to study them. What seems like early humans hunting a bison to us hints at the special bond between early humans and animals was cultural and philosophical, and not just physical. Early humans were small and wiry, and physically weak compared to the megafauna they shared their world with. Many cave paintings suggest they lived in a world of near-perpetual terror, where their very survival depended on cooperation with their neighbours, or whoever they happened to be sharing their cave with at the time.
It’s simplistic — and too easy — to draw comparisons between the world of yesterday and today, where politics and depletion of the environment are concerned, but it’s fascinating to see new answers to old questions being revealed almost every day.
Hardly anyone is likely to have fond memories of 2019, looking back on it in future years, but one positive does jump out: This was an outstanding, possibly unique year for breakthroughs in the field of palaeoanthropology and cave art.
©Adam Brunn/Griffith University (Australia)