The Tamesis
Less than two years after discovering a 51,200-year-old pig cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, then known as the oldest piece of figurative art, these researchers have uncovered an even older work.
The newly dated work, located in southeast Sulawesi, is a handmade template dating back 67,800 years. Not much remains of the work: according to an article published in the magazine, it now exists only in the form of “a 14 × 10 cm patch of faded pigment on which is part of a finger and the adjacent palm area” nature Wednesday.
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Like the discovery of the 2024 pig painting, this new discovery is the result of long-term research by archaeologists from Australia’s Griffith University, multiple Indonesian archaeological organizations and the National Research and Innovation Agency.
Beginning in 2019, researchers documented 44 cave painting sites in southeastern Suweisi and determined a minimum age using a new uranium series dating method, dating 11 individual rock art patterns (seven handmade stencils and four other paintings). The oldest handmade template was found in a cave on the small island of Munna.
“We were able to date the artwork by analyzing the thin mineral shell that formed on top of the painting,” said study co-author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University. The Art Newspaper. “Because these shells grew after the artwork was made, they tell us the youngest age of these images.”
To create stencils, ancient people placed their hands on rocks and blew paint onto their hands. Research suggests the Sulawesi template is unique because people reshaped their fingertips to be pointed, which Obert said may have had “symbolic meaning” related to animals.
Early discoveries of pig paintings were found in the Maros-Pangkep Karst region of southwestern Sulawesi, which, as the researchers write, has received more attention from researchers than the southeastern region.
“Our dating surveys in Southeast Sulawesi show that extremely ancient petroglyphs are not only concentrated in the Maros-Pangkep area of the southwestern peninsula, but also occur elsewhere on the large Wallacea island (approximately 174,000 square kilometres).2),” they wrote in the study. “These findings support the growing view that Sulawesi had a vibrant and long-standing artistic culture during the Late Pleistocene. ”
The researchers further assert that the new discovery suggests that the ancient continent of Sahul, which consists of Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania, was originally settled through sea travel between Borneo and Papua. It also confirms the “chronology” theory, which postulates that people arrived in Australia and the surrounding area as early as 60,000-65,000 years ago, rather than 50,000 years ago as previously thought.
“Archaeological and genetic evidence now strongly supports the long chronology and suggests that the ancestors of Australia’s Aboriginals were traveling through Southeast Asia, creating symbolic art along the way,” Obert said.
