World's Oldest Animal Drawing, Discovered in Borneo Cave, Is a Weird Cow Beast
Desenhar animais, uma realização em si, pode ter sido uma porta de entrada para ilustrar outros aspectos da experiência humana, incluindo a caça e a dança. "Inicialmente, os humanos fizeram pinturas figurativas de animais de grande porte e, mais tarde, começaram a representar o mundo humano", disse o pesquisador Maxime Aubert, arqueólogo e geoquímico da Universidade Griffith, na Austrália.[In Photos: The World's Oldest Cave Art]
The ancient artwork covers the walls of secluded limestone caves in the
rugged and remote mountains of the East Kalimantan province of
Indonesian Borneo. Researchers have known about these human-made
drawings since 1994, but they didn't know when the illustrations were
created until now, said Aubert, who worked with Indonesia's National
Research Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS) and the Bandung Institute of
Technology (ITB).
The researchers collected calcium-carbonate samples from the Kalimantan
cave drawings so they could do uranium-series dating — a technique made
possible by radioactive decay. When rainwater seeps through limestone,
it dissolves a small amount of uranium, Aubert told Live Science. As uranium (a radioactive element) decays, it turns into the element thorium.
By studying the ratio of uranium to thorium in the calcium carbonate
(limestone) that is coating the cave art, researchers determined how old
the initial coating was, he said.
This cow-like beast is the oldest known figurative artwork in the world. It's at least 40,000 years old.
Credit: Luc-Henri Fage
The oldest figurative art — the mystery animal that is likely a species
of wild cattle that once stomped around the jungles of Borneo — was at
least 40,000 years old, Aubert said. Previously, the oldest known animal painting in the world was an approximately 35,400-year-old babirusa, or "pig-deer," on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, he said.
Artwork through the ages
The team's results showed that the ancient artwork in East Kalimantan
was made during three distinct periods. The first phase, which dates to
between 52,000 and 40,000 years ago, includes hand stencils and
reddish-orange ochre-drawn animals — mostly the banteng (Bos javanicus), a type of wild cattle that still lives in Borneo, and the mysterious, unknown wild cow, Aubert said.
A major change happened to the culture during the icy Last Glacial
Maximum about 20,000 years ago, which led to a new style of rock art —
one that focused on the human world. The artists in this phase favored a
dark mulberry-purple color and painted hand stencils, abstract signs
and human-like figures wearing elaborate headdresses and engaging in
various activities, such as hunting or ritualistic dancing, the
researchers said.
"We don't know if these [different types of cave art] are from two
different groups of humans, or if it represents the evolution of a particular culture,"
Aubert said. "We are planning archaeological excavation in those caves
in order to find more information about these unknown artists."
These mulberry-colored hands
were painted over the older, reddish hand stencils found in the
Indonesian cave. These two styles were created at least 20,000 years
apart.
Credit: Kinez Riza
The final phase of rock art includes humanlike figures, boats and
geometric designs that were mostly drawn with black pigments, the
researchers said. This type of art is found elsewhere in Indonesia and
may come from Asian Neolithic farmers who moved into the region about
4,000 years ago, or more recently, the researchers said. [Photos: Oldest Known Drawing Was Made with a Red Crayon]
Location, location
During the last ice age, Borneo (Earth's third-largest island) sat on the easternmost edge of Eurasia.
"It now seems that two early cave art provinces arose at a similar time
in remote corners of Paleolithic Eurasia: one in Europe, and one in
Indonesia at the opposite end of this ice age world," study
co-researcher Adam Brumm, an associate professor of archaeology at
Griffith University, said in a statement.
It's possible that rock art spread from Eurasia
to Sulawesi, where the babirusa drawing resides, before colonizing
humans spread it farther to places like Australia, Aubert said.
These human figures date to at
least 13,600 years ago. It's possible they drawn at the height of the
last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago.
Credit: Pindi Setiawan
The new finding shows further evidence that "the earliest art consisted
of large animals painted in a remarkably naturalistic style, with
emphasis on the musculature and form of the animal's body," said Susan
O'Connor, a professor of archaeology at the College of Asia & the
Pacific at Australian National University, who wasn't involved with the
research.
"The location of these ancient paintings of animals and hand stencils perhaps marks the passage of the first modern humans as they moved through mainland Asia and
out into the islands of Wallacea, lying between the mainland and
continental Sahul (Australia and New Guinea which were joined at this
time)," O'Connor told Live Science in an email. "They may have used art
to mark and 'humanize' these new and unfamiliar landscapes."
The newly dated cave art fits in with the emerging picture of early humans. Homo sapiens
left Africa between about 70,000 and 60,000 years ago, and "once they
spread out across Eurasia, they developed, after about 40,000 years ago,
the desire (or ability) to produce figurative art," Christopher
Henshilwood, director of the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour at the
University of Bergen in Norway, who wasn't involved with the study, told
Live Science in an email. "This find in Indonesia thus
adds to our knowledge regarding the evolution of figurative art,
perhaps first in Asia, then in Europe and Africa." (Africa's oldest
figurative art dates to about 30,000 years ago at the Apollo 11 Cave in
Namibia, Henshilwood noted.)
Originally published on Live Science.
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