Unveiling Ancient Imagination: The Oldest Figurative Art by Humans
Paragraph 1
Some 44,000 years ago, an artist climbed high onto a cave ledge on an Indonesian island, paintbrush in hand. Perhaps inspired by spiritual visions, the artist sketched a dynamic scene featuring tiny, animal-headed hunters armed with spears cornering formidable wild hogs and small buffaloes. In a new study, researchers argue that the scene's visionary storytelling – which they claim represents the oldest known figurative art made by modern humans – shows that people already had imaginations much like our own at the time of the cave painting, and likely much earlier.
Paragraph 2
"We think of the ability for humans to make a story, a narrative scene, as one of the last steps of human cognition," says the study's lead author, Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia. "This is the oldest rock art in the world and all of the key aspects of modern cognition are there." For the past 5 years, Aubert and colleagues have been exploring dozens of caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and have turned up hundreds of hand stencils, cave paintings, red pigment crayons, and carved figurines. Archaeological data suggest the artists came with an early wave of modern humans some 50,000 years ago. Modern Sulawesians hail from successive waves of Australasian populations that began to arrive much later, between 3500 and 4000 years ago.
Paragraph 3
In 2017, co-author Pak Hamrullah, an Indonesian archaeologist and caver, noticed […] a panel, painted with a red ochre pigment. The hunted animals appear to be the Sulawesi warty pig and a small horned bovine called an anoa, or dwarf buffalo, both of which still live on the island. But it was the animal-like features of the eight hunters, armed with spears or ropes, that captivated Aubert. Several appear to have elongated muzzles or snouts. One seems to possess a tail, while another's mouth resembles a bird beak. … More likely, the figures represent mythical animal-human hybrids, Aubert says…
Paragraph 4
To date the Sulawesi cave painting, Aubert carefully pried out a few centimetre-wide shards from the painted cave wall […] and brought them back to his lab. Over the years, as rainwater trickled through the cave's porous limestone and seeped down its walls, it left small mineral deposits called cave popcorn on top of the paint. The popcorn holds trace amounts of uranium, which over time decays into thorium at a fixed rate. By analysing the ratio of uranium to thorium in the mineral layer directly on top of the pigment, the researchers calculated the painting's minimum age: 44,000 years old, they report this week in Nature.
Paragraph 5
That would make the cave scene at least 4000 years older than other instances of figurative ancient rock art found in Indonesia and Europe, and some 20,000 years older than the oldest depictions of hunting scenes in Europe… The ability to imagine beings that don't exist is a critical cognitive milestone and forms the roots of religion and spirituality. Seeing this ability fully formed 44,000 years ago in Sulawesi suggests it was probably already present in the early modern humans who left Africa and populated the rest of the world… The findings should also help dispel the outdated and mistaken notion that humanity first became fully modern in Europe…
