40,000 year old Indonesian cave art may be humanity’s oldest

A depiction of a local animal, just above a hand stencil, from one of the Indonesian caves.

Kinez Riza

Art is one of the more enigmatic developments in human history. It simultaneously demonstrates that humans had mastered the ability to abstract images from the actual items they represented and had begun to create things without a direct benefit for survival. Since both of these are mental processes, it's impossible to link them to any change in anatomy or with the development of tools. Furthering the enigma, some of the first art we've discovered, such as the cave paintings in Europe, are remarkably sophisticated. How did such a large leap occur so suddenly?

Maybe it didn't. That's the suggestion made by the authors of a new paper that provides dates for some art left on cave walls on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. The dates indicate that the cave art was created at the same time as the first European paintings, yet it was made by people who may have been out of contact with those who settled Europe since their common ancestors first left Africa. This, the authors suggest, may indicate that art was part of the "toolkit" people had when they left Africa.

This is the case of a discovery that's been hiding in plain sight. The paintings, located in a series of caves along the southwest side of the island, were first described in the 1950s. But they were initially thought to be a few thousand years old. Over the intervening years, Indonesian researchers noted that there were actually two distinct sets of art on the cave walls. One was clearly similar to works produced by Austronesians, a culture that spread across the Pacific relatively recently. But a second set—usually in hard to access locations in the caves—was stylistically distinct.