Cave art mankind’s earliest painting
Archaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest figurative art: a 44,000-year-old hunting scene that may be the earliest evidence of humans edging towards religion.
The researchers who found the cave painting on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, believe it shows a group of human figures with animal features, including one with a tail. The imaginary beings, known as therianthropes, are hunting wild pigs and dwarf buffaloes with spears or ropes.
The researchers suggested that the 4m-wide frieze could be the oldest evidence found of a human ability to imagine the existence of supernatural beings. Professor Adam Brumm of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution said: ‘‘Therianthropes occur in the folklore or narrative fiction of almost every modern society and they are perceived as gods, spirits, or ancestral beings in many religions worldwide. Sulawesi is now home to the oldest image of this kind.’’
Until now the earliest therianthrope was the ‘‘lionman’’, a 40,000-year-old figurine found in Germany. The oldest figurative cave art had been a 40,000-year-old painting of a wild cow reported last year in East Kalimantan, an Indonesian province of Borneo.
Brumm, co-author of a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature, said: ‘‘Early Indonesians were creating art that may have expressed spiritual thinking about the special bond between humans and animals long before the first art was made in Europe, where it has often been assumed the roots of modern religious culture can be traced.’’
Homo sapiens is thought to have arrived in southeast Asia somewhere between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago and spread through northern Europe roughly 20,000 years later.
The Indonesian painting also appears to be the first known artwork that tries to tell a story. The pictures were painted using red ochre pigments made from crushed iron oxides and dated by analysing a mineral deposit that had formed a crust over the images.
By measuring the radioactive decay of uranium and other elements within the mineral crust the researchers were able to estimate a minimum age of about 44,000 years.
– The Times