This large cave wall in Borneo features several paintings of wild cattle; the indistinct image at top center has been dated to at least 40,000 years old.

Luc-Henri Fage

Esta imagem animal pode ser a arte figurativa mais antiga do mundo

By John PickrellNov. 7, 2018 , 1:00 PM

Pintadas de laranja ocre há pelo menos 40 mil anos, imagens do que parece ser gado selvagem na ilha indonésia de Bornéu são hoje as mais antigas pinturas figurativas conhecidas no mundo. Pintados em uma remota caverna de calcário, eles são mais de 4000 anos mais antigos do que os recordistas anteriores nas proximidades de Sulawesi, e acrescentam evidências de que tradições artísticas florescentes estavam surgindo simultaneamente na Europa e na Ásia.

Até recentemente, a maioria dos pesquisadores achava que a casa das primeiras pinturas figurativas - aquelas que representavam pessoas e animais, em vez de objetos abstratos - era a Caverna Chauvet da França. Imagens vívidas de rinocerontes pré-históricos, leões-das-cavernas e cavalos foram datadas de cerca de 35.000 anos de idade. Mas em 2014, uma equipe liderada pelo geoquímico e arqueólogo Maxime Aubert, da Universidade Griffith, em Gold Coast, na Austrália, datou de pinturas de porcos selvagens em cavernas na ilha indonésia de Sulawesi com pelo menos 35.400 anos de idade. Stencils de mãos humanas tinham pelo menos 40.000 anos de idade.

Now, as they report today in Nature, Aubert’s joint Indonesian-Australia team has dated a painting of what may be a banteng, a Southeast Asian wild cattle, in Borneo’s Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, to at least 40,000 years ago; hand stencils there may be up to 52,000 years old, making them among the oldest such prints in the world.

“This is a remarkably important finding,” says Sue O’Connor, an archaeologist at Australian National University in Canberra who focuses on Southeast Asia and Australia, but was not involved in the new study. “It shows that the [previously discovered] Sulawesi rock art … was not regionally unique, but rather is part of a larger artistic and symbolic tradition” tracking some of the earliest modern humans in Southeast Asia, she says.

Rock art adorns many caves in the mountainous province of East Kalimantan. The researchers found that the paintings in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave are of three styles and ages: the ancient orange animals and hand stencils; purplish hand stencils, intricate motifs, and dynamic human figures dated to 20,000 to 21,000 years ago; and black charcoal designs thought to have been left by Neolithic farmers about 4000 years ago. Over the millennia “there was clearly a shift from depicting the animal world to depicting the human world,” Aubert says—a trend also seen in the cave art of Europe.

To date the paintings, Aubert’s team turned to a now widely used technique, measuring the ratios of uranium and thorium in the calcite crusts that had accumulated on top of the cave paintings. The scientists took 65 different samples and tested for contamination that could have come from sources other than the calcite. They showed that the calcite layers were youngest at the surface and oldest closer to the paintings, meaning the dating is sound, Aubert says.

Jane Balme, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia in

 Perth, says the discovery “draws attention to the widespread similarities in human’s symbolic expression across the globe.” We now know that the famous cave art of Europe “is just one area where such expression occurred 40,000 years ago,” she says.

But precisely how the various styles of art are linked to waves of migration is still an open question. “The discovery of three different chronological styles is quite amazing, as we can follow the evolution and changes of rock art over 50,000 years,” says Francois-Xavier Ricaut, a biological anthropologist from the University of Toulouse in France, who has also been working on Borneo. He says the big question now is whether the two older types of art represent the arrival of different peoples or were created by one population whose style evolved over time.
Aubert suspects humans in the region—present as far back as 60,000 to 70,000 years ago—didn’t create art until populations reached a critical mass. That wouldn’t have been true of the region’s earliest inhabitants, of whom no art has been discovered.
His team plans to look for butchered animal bones, tools, and other traces of the ancient artisans in the caves, starting next year. “We want to find out who made those paintings,” he says.

Posted in:

• Archaeology

doi:10.1126/science.aav9862