Bull silhouette drawn in Indonesian cave found to be 40,000 years old

Scientists have found the oldest known example of an animal drawing: a red silhouette of a bull-like beast on the wall of an Indonesian cave. The sketch is at least 40,000 years old, slightly older than similar animal paintings found in caves in France and Spain. Until a few years ago, experts believed Europe was where our ancestors started drawing animals and other figures. But the age of the drawing reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, along with previous finds in South-East Asia, suggest that figurative drawing appeared on both continents about the same time. The new findings fuel debate about whether historical or evolutionary events prompted this near-simultaneous “burst of human creativity”, said lead author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia. To reach the remote limestones caves on Borneo, Dr Aubert and his team used machetes to hack through thick jungle. They walked and crawled through miles of caves decorated with hundreds of ancient designs, looking for artwork that could be dated. They needed to find specific mineral deposits on the drawings to determine their age with technology that measures decay of the element uranium. “Most of the paintings we can’t sample,” Mr Aubert said. He and fellow researchers reported in 2014 on cave art from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They dated hand stencils, created by blowing dye through a tube to capture the outline of a hand pressed against rock, to almost 40,000 years ago.