a journey to the oldest cave paintings in the world

8/20/2019 A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the World

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A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the WorldThe discovery in a remote part of Indonesia has scholars rethinking the origins of art—andof humanity

I struggle to keep my footing on a narrow ridge of earth snaking between flooded fields of rice. Thestalks, almost ready to harvest, ripple in the breeze, giving the valley the appearance of ashimmering green sea. In the distance, steep limestone hills rise from the ground, perhaps 400 feettall, the remains of an ancient coral reef. Rivers have eroded the landscape over millions of years,leaving behind a flat plain interrupted by these bizarre towers, called karsts, which are full of holes,channels and interconnecting caves carved by water seeping through the rock.

e!re on the island of "ulawesi, in Indonesia, an hour!s drive north of the bustling port of#akassar. e approach the nearest karst undeterred by a group of large black maca$ues thatscreech at us from trees high on the cliff and climb a bamboo ladder through ferns to a cave called%eang Timpuseng. Inside, the usual sounds of everyday life here&cows, roosters, passingmotorbikes&are barely audible through the insistent chirping of insects and birds. The cave is

cramped and awkward, and rocks crowd into the space, giving the feeling that it might close up atany moment. 'ut its modest appearance can!t diminish my e(citement) I know this place is host tosomething magical, something I!ve traveled nearly *,000 miles to see."cattered on the walls are stencils, human hands outlined against a background of red paint. Thoughfaded, they are stark and evocative, a thrilling message from the distant past. #y companion,#a(ime +ubert, directs me to a narrow semicircular alcove, like the apse of a cathedral, and I cranemy neck to a spot near the ceiling a few feet above my head. ust visible on darkened grayish rockis a seemingly abstract pattern of red lines.Then my eyes focus and the lines coalesce into a figure, an animal with a large, bulbous body, sticklegs and a diminutive head) a babirusa, or pig-deer, once common in these valleys. +ubert pointsout its neatly sketched features in admiration. %ook, there!s a line to represent the ground,/ hesays. There are no tusks&it!s female. +nd there!s a curly tail at the back./This ghostly babirusa has been known to locals for decades, but it wasn!t until +ubert, a geochemistand archaeologist, used a techni$ue he developed to date the painting that its importance wasrevealed. e found that it is staggeringly ancient) at least 12,400 years old. That likely makes it theoldest-known e(ample of figurative art anywhere in the world&the world!s very first picture.It!s among more than a dozen other dated cave paintings on "ulawesi that now rival the earliestcave art in "pain and 3rance, long believed to be the oldest on earth.The findings made headlines around the world when +ubert and his colleagues announced them inlate 054, and the implications are revolutionary. They smash our most common ideas about theorigins of art and force us to embrace a far richer picture of how and where our species first awoke.

idden away in a damp cave on the other/ side of the world, this curly-tailed creature is ourclosest link yet to the moment when the human mind, with its uni$ue capacity for imagination andsymbolism, switched on.

ho were the first people,/ who saw and interpreted the world as we do6 "tudies of genes andfossils agree that omo sapiens evolved in +frica 00,000 years ago. 'ut although these earliesthumans looked like us, it!s not clear they thought like us.Intellectual breakthroughs in human evolution such as tool-making were mastered by other homininspecies more than a million years ago. hat sets us apart is our ability to think and plan for thefuture, and to remember and learn from the past&what theorists of early human cognition call

higher order consciousness./"uch sophisticated thinking was a huge competitive advantage, helping us to cooperate, survive in

harsh environments and colonize new lands. It also opened the door to imaginary realms, spiritworlds and a host of intellectual and emotional connections that infused our lives with meaning

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beyond the basic impulse to survive. +nd because it enabled symbolic thinking&our ability to letone thing stand for another&it allowed people to make visual representations of things that theycould remember and imagine. e couldn!t conceive of art, or conceive of the value of art, until wehad higher order consciousness,/ says 'en7amin "mith, a rock art scholar at the 8niversity of

estern +ustralia. In that sense, ancient art is a marker for this cognitive shift) 3ind early paintings,particularly figurative representations like animals, and you!ve found evidence for the modern

human mind.8ntil +ubert went to "ulawesi, the oldest dated art was firmly in 9urope. The spectacular lions andrhinos of :hauvet :ave, in southeastern 3rance, are commonly thought to be around 10,000 to1 ,000 years old, and mammoth-ivory figurines found in ;ermany correspond to roughly the sametime. Representational pictures or sculptures don!t appear elsewhere until thousands of yearsafterward. "o it has long been assumed that sophisticated abstract thinking, perhaps unlocked by alucky genetic mutation, emerged in 9urope shortly after modern humans arrived there about 40,000years ago. <nce 9uropeans started to paint, their skills, and their human genius, must have thenspread around the world.'ut e(perts now challenge that standard view. +rchaeologists in "outh +frica have found that thepigment ocher was used in caves 5=4,000 years ago. They have also unearthed deliberately piercedshells with marks suggesting they were strung like 7ewelry, as well as chunks of ocher, oneengraved with a zigzag design&hinting that the capacity for art was present long before humansleft +frica. "till, the evidence is frustratingly indirect. >erhaps the ocher wasn!t for painting but formos$uito repellent. +nd the engravings could have been one-offs, doodles with no symbolicmeaning, says il Roebroeks, an e(pert in the archaeology of early humans, of %eiden 8niversityin the ?etherlands. <ther e(tinct hominin species have left similarly inconclusive artifacts.'y contrast, the gorgeous animal cave paintings in 9urope represent a consistent tradition. Theseeds of artistic creativity may have been sown earlier, but many scholars celebrate 9urope as theplace where it burst, full-fledged, into view. 'efore :hauvet and 9l :astillo, the famous art-filledcave in northern "pain, we don!t have anything that smacks of figurative art,/ says Roebroeks.

'ut from that point on,/ he continues, you have the full human package. umans were more orless comparable to you and me./@et the lack of older paintings may not reflect the true history of rock art so much as the fact thatthey can be very difficult to date. Radiocarbon dating, the kind used to determine the age of thecharcoal paintings at :hauvet, is based on the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-54 and worksonly on organic remains. It!s no good for studying inorganic pigments like ocher, a form of irono(ide used fre$uently in ancient cave paintings.This is where +ubert comes in. Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wantedto date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks intrace amounts. 8ranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these twoelements in a sample reveals its ageA the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample. The

techni$ue, known as uranium series dating, was used to determine that zircon crystals from estern+ustralia were more than four billion years old, proving 9arth!s minimum age. 'ut it can also datenewer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively asspeleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock.+ubert, who grew up in %Bvis, :anada, and says he has been interested in archaeology and rock artsince childhood, thought to date rock formations at a minute scale directly above and below ancientpaintings, to work out their minimum and ma(imum age. To do this would re$uire analyzing almostimpossibly thin layers cut from a cave wall&less than a millimeter thick. Then a >hC student at the+ustralian ?ational 8niversity in :anberra, +ubert had access to a state-of-the-art spectrometer,and he started to e(periment with the machine, to see if he could accurately date such tiny samples.

ithin a few years, +dam 'rumm, an archaeologist at the 8niversity of ollongong, where +ubert

had received a postdoctoral fellowship&today they are both based at ;riffith 8niversity&starteddigging in caves in "ulawesi. 'rumm was working with the late #ike #orwood, co-discoverer of

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the diminutive hominin omo floresiensis, which once lived on the nearby Indonesian island of3lores. The evolutionary origins of this so-called hobbit/ remain a mystery, but, to have reached3lores from mainland "outheast +sia, its ancestors must have passed through "ulawesi. 'rummhoped to find them.+s they worked, 'rumm and his Indonesian colleagues were struck by the hand stencils and animalimages that surrounded them. The standard view was that ?eolithic farmers or other "tone +ge

people made the markings no more than 2,000 years ago&such markings on relatively e(posedrock in a tropical environment, it was thought, couldn!t have lasted longer than that without erodingaway. 'ut the archaeological evidence showed that modern humans had arrived on "ulawesi at least12,000 years ago. :ould some of the paintings be older6 e were drinking palm wine in theevenings, talking about the rock art and how we might date it,/ 'rumm recalls. +nd it dawned onhim) +ubert!s new method seemed perfect.+fter that, 'rumm looked for paintings partly obscured by speleothems every chance he got. <neday off, I visited %eang arie,/ he says. %eang arie means :ave of 3ingers,/ named for the dozensof stencils decorating its walls. %ike %eang Timpuseng, it is covered by small growths of whiteminerals formed by the evaporation of seeping or dripping water, which are nicknamed cavepopcorn./ I walked in and bang, I saw these things. The whole ceiling was covered with popcorn,and I could see bits of hand stencils in between,/ recalls 'rumm. +s soon as he got home, he told+ubert to come to "ulawesi.+ubert spent a week the ne(t summer touring the region by motorbike. e took samples from fivepaintings partly covered by popcorn, each time using a diamond-tipped drill to cut a small s$uareout of the rock, about 5.2 centimeters across and a few millimeters deep.'ack in +ustralia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers beforeseparating out the uranium and thorium in each one. @ou collect the powder, then remove anotherlayer, then collect the powder,/ +ubert says. @ou!re trying to get as close as possible to the paintlayer./ Then he drove from ollongong to :anberra to analyze his samples using the massspectrometer, sleeping in his van outside the lab so he could work as many hours as possible, tominimize the number of days he needed on the e(pensive machine. 8nable to get funding for thepro7ect, he had to pay for his flight to "ulawesi&and for the analysis&himself. I was totallybroke, he says.The very first age +ubert calculated was for a hand stencil from the :ave of 3ingers. I thought,D<h, shit,!/ he says. "o I calculated it again./ Then he called 'rumm.

I couldn!t make sense of what he was saying,/ 'rumm recalls. e blurted out, D12,000E! I wasstunned. I said, are you sure6 I had the feeling immediately that this was going to be big./

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The caves we visit in "ulawesi are astonishing in their variety. They range from small rock shelters

to huge caverns inhabited by venomous spiders and large bats. 9verywhere there is evidence of howwater has formed and changed these spaces. The rock is bubbling and dynamic, often glisteningwet. It erupts into shapes resembling skulls, 7ellyfish, waterfalls and chandeliers. +s well as familiarstalactites and stalagmites, there are columns, curtains, steps and terraces&and popcorneverywhere. It grows like barnacles on the ceilings and walls.

e!re 7oined by #uhammad Ramli, an archaeologist at the :enter for the >reservation of+rchaeological eritage, in #akassar. Ramli knows the art in these caves intimately. The first onehe visited, as a student in 5G*5, was a small site called %eang Hassi. e remembers it well, he says,not least because while staying overnight in the cave he was captured by local villagers who thoughthe was a headhunter. Ramli is now a portly but energetic 22-year-old with a wide-brimmede(plorer!s hat and a collection of T-shirts with messages like "ave our heritage/ and Heep calm

and visit museums./ e has cataloged more than 5 0 rock art sites in this region, and hasestablished a system of gates and guards to protect the caves from damage and graffiti.

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+lmost all of the markings he shows me, in ocher and charcoal, appear in relatively e(posed areas,lit by the sun. +nd they were apparently made by all members of the community. +t one site, Iclimb a fig tree into a small, high chamber and am rewarded by the outline of a hand so small itcould belong to my -year-old son. +t another, hands are lined up in two horizontal tracks, all withfingers pointing to the left. 9lsewhere there are hands with slender, pointed digits possibly createdby overlapping one stencil with anotherA with painted palm linesA and with fingers that are bent or

missing.There!s still a tradition on "ulawesi of mi(ing rice powder with water to make a handprint on thecentral pillar of a new house, Ramli e(plains, to protect against evil spirits. It!s a symbol ofstrength,/ he says. #aybe the prehistoric man thought like that too./ +nd on the nearby island of>apua, he says, some people e(press their grief when a loved one dies by cutting off a finger.>erhaps, he suggests, the stencils with missing fingers indicate that this practice too has ancientorigins.>aul Ta on, an e(pert in rock art at ;riffith 8niversity, notes that the hand stencils are similar todesigns created until recently in northern +ustralia. +boriginal +ustralian elders he has interviewede(plain that their stencils are intended to e(press connection to a particular place, to say) I washere. This is my home./ The "ulawesi hand stencils were probably made for similar reasons,/ hesays. Ta on believes that once the leap to rock art was made, a new cognitive path&the ability toretain comple( information over time&had been set. That was a ma7or change,/ he says.There are two main phases of artwork in these caves. + series of black charcoal drawings& geometric shapes and stick figures including animals such as roosters and dogs, which wereintroduced to "ulawesi in the last few thousand years&haven!t been dated but presumably couldnot have been made before the arrival of these species.+longside these are red Jand occasionally purplish-blackK paintings that look very different) handstencils and animals, including the babirusa in %eang Timpuseng, and other species endemic to thisisland, such as the warty pig. These are the paintings dated by +ubert and his colleagues, whosepaper, published in ?ature in <ctober 054, ultimately included more than 20 dates from 54paintings. #ost ancient of all was a hand stencil Jright beside the record-breaking babirusaK with aminimum age of 1G,G00 years&making it the oldest-known stencil anywhere, and 7ust G00 yearsshy of the world!s oldest-known cave painting of any kind, a simple red disk at 9l :astillo. Theyoungest stencil was dated to no more than L, 00 years ago, showing that this artistic traditionlasted largely unchanged on "ulawesi for at least 51 millennia.The findings obliterated what we thought we knew about the birth of human creativity. +t aminimum, they proved once and for all that art did not arise in 9urope. 'y the time the shapes ofhands and horses began to adorn the caves of 3rance and "pain, people here were alreadydecorating their own walls. 'ut if 9uropeans didn!t invent these art forms, who did6<n that, e(perts are divided. Ta on doesn!t rule out the possibility that art might have arisenindependently in different parts of the world after modern humans left +frica. e points out that

although hand stencils are common in 9urope, +sia and +ustralia, they are rarely seen in +frica atany time. hen you venture to new lands, there are all kinds of challenges relating to the newenvironment,/ he says. @ou have to find your way around, and deal with strange plants, predatorsand prey. >erhaps people in +frica were already decorating their bodies, or making $uick drawingsin the ground. 'ut with rock markings, the migrants could signpost unfamiliar landscapes and stamptheir identity onto new territories.@et there are thought-provoking similarities between the earliest "ulawesian and 9uropeanfigurative art&the animal paintings are detailed and naturalistic, with skillfully drawn lines to givethe impression of a babirusa!s fur or, in 9urope, the mane of a bucking horse. Ta on believes thatthe technical parallels suggest that painting naturalistic animals is part of a shared hunter-gathererpractice rather than a tradition of any particular culture./ In other words, there may be something

about such a lifestyle that provoked a common practice, rather than its arising from a single group.'ut "mith, of the 8niversity of estern +ustralia, argues that the similarities&ocher use, hand

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stenciling and lifelike animals&can!t be coincidental. e thinks these techni$ues must have arisenin +frica before the waves of migrations off the continent began. It!s a view in common with manye(perts. #y bet would be that this was in the rucksack of the first colonizers,/ adds ilRoebroeks, of %eiden 8niversity.The eminent 3rench prehistorian ean :lottes believes that techni$ues such as stenciling may wellhave developed separately in different groups, including those who eventually settled on "ulawesi.

<ne of the world!s most respected authorities on cave art, :lottes led research on :hauvet :ave thathelped to fuel the idea of a 9uropean human revolution./ hy shouldn!t they make hand stencilsif they wanted to6/ he asks, when I reach him at his home in 3oi(, 3rance. >eople reinvent thingsall the time./ 'ut although he is eager to see +ubert!s results replicated by other researchers, hefeels that what many suspected from the pierced shells and carved ocher chunks found in +frica isnow all but inescapable) 3ar from being a late development, the sparks of artistic creativity can betraced back to our earliest ancestors on that continent. herever you find modern humans, hebelieves, you!ll find art.

FFFFFFFFFFIn a cavern known locally as #ountain-Tunnel :ave, buckets, a wheelbarrow and countless bags ofclay surround a neatly dug trench, five meters long by three meters deep, where +dam 'rumm isoverseeing a dig that is revealing how the island!s early artists lived.>eople arrived on "ulawesi as part of a wave of migration from east +frica that started around=0,000 years ago, likely traveling across the Red "ea and the +rabian >eninsula to present-dayIndia, "outheast +sia and 'orneo, which at the time was part of the mainland. To reach "ulawesi,which has always been an island, they would have needed boats or rafts to cross a minimum of =0miles of ocean. +lthough human remains from this period haven!t yet been found on "ulawesi, theisland!s first inhabitants are thought to have been closely related to the first people to colonize+ustralia around 20,000 years ago. They probably looked broadly similar to +boriginal or >apuanpeople today,/ says 'rumm.'rumm and his team have unearthed evidence of fire-building, hearths and precisely crafted stonetools, which may have been used to make weapons for hunting. @et while the inhabitants of thiscave sometimes hunted large animals such as wild boar, the archaeological remains show that theymostly ate freshwater shellfish and an animal known as the "ulawesi bear cuscus&a slow-movingtree-dwelling marsupial with a long, prehensile tail.The 3rench anthropologist :laude %Bvi-"trauss famously argued in 5G= that primitive peopleschose to identify with and represent animals not because they were good to eat/ but because theywere good to think./ 3or ice age 9uropean cave painters, horses, rhinos, mammoths and lions wereless important as dinner than as inspiration. +ncient "ulawesians, it seems, were likewise moved todepict larger, more daunting and impressive animals than the ones they fre$uently ate.The hunt is now on for even older paintings that might take us ever closer to the moment of our

species! awakening. +ubert is collecting samples of limestone from painted caves elsewhere in+sia, including in 'orneo, along the route that migrants would have taken to "ulawesi. +nd he and"mith are also independently working to develop new techni$ues to study other types of caves,including sandstone sites common in +ustralia and +frica. "andstone doesn!t form cave popcorn,but the rock forms a silica skin/ that can be dated."mith, working with colleagues at several institutions, is 7ust getting the first results from ananalysis of paintings and engravings in the Himberley, an area in northwestern +ustralia reached bymodern humans at least 20,000 years ago. The e(pectation is that we may see some very e(citingearly dates,/ "mith says. It wouldn!t surprise me at all if pretty $uickly we get a whole mass ofdates that are earlier than in 9urope./ +nd scholars now talk e(citedly about the prospect ofanalyzing cave paintings in +frica. GG.G percent of rock art is undated,/ says "mith, citing, as an

e(ample, ocher representations of crocodiles and hippos found in the "ahara, often on sandstoneand granite. The conventional date on those would be 52,000 to 0,000 years old,/ he says. 'ut

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there!s no reason they couldn!t be older./+s the origins of art e(tend backward, we!ll have to revise our often localized ideas of whatprompted such aesthetic e(pression in the first place. It has previously been suggested that 9urope!sharsh northern climate necessitated strong social bonds, which in turn nudged the development oflanguage and art. <r that competition with ?eanderthals, present in 9urope until around 2,000years ago, pushed modern humans to e(press their identity by painting on cave walls&ancient

hominin flag-planting. Those arguments fall away,/ says "mith, because that wasn!t where ithappened./:lottes has championed the theory that in 9urope, where art was hidden deep inside dark chambers,the main function of cave paintings was to communicate with the spirit world. "mith is likewiseconvinced that in +frica, spiritual beliefs drove the very first art. e cites Rhino :ave in 'otswana,where archaeologists have found that =2,000 to L0,000 years ago people sacrificed carefully madespearheads by burning or smashing them in front of a large rock panel carved with hundreds ofcircular holes. e can be sure that in instances like that, they believed in some sort of spiritualforce,/ says "mith. +nd they believed that art, and ritual in relation to art, could affect thosespiritual forces for their own benefit. They!re not 7ust doing it to create pretty pictures. They!redoing it because they!re communicating with the spirits of the land./In #ountain-Tunnel :ave, which has hand stencils and abundant traces of paint on the walls,'rumm is now also finding the early artists! materials. In strata dated to around the same time asnearby stencils, he says, there!s a ma7or spike in ocher./ "o far, his team has found stone tools withocher smeared over the edges and golf ball-size ocher chunks with scrape marks. There are alsoscattered fragments, probably dropped and splashed when the artists ground up their ocher beforemi(ing it with water&enough, in fact, that this entire slice of earth is stained cherry red.'rumm says this layer of habitation stretches back at least *,000 years, and he is in the process ofanalyzing older layers, using radiocarbon dating for the organic remains and uranium series datingof horizontal stalagmites that run through the sediment.

e calls this a crucial opportunity./ 3or the first time in this part of the world, he says, we!relinking the buried evidence with the rock art./ hat that evidence shows is that on this island, atleast, cave art wasn!t always an occasional activity carried out in remote, sacred spaces. If religiousbelief played a part, it was entwined with everyday life. In the middle of this cave floor, the first"ulawesians sat together around the fire to cook, eat, make tools&and to mi( paint.

FFFFFFFFFFIn a small hidden valley +ubert, Ramli and I walk across fields of rice in the early morning.Cragonflies glitter in the sun. +t the far edge, we climb a set of steps high up a cliff to abreathtaking view and a cavernous entrance hall inhabited by swallows.In a low chamber inside, pigs amble across the ceiling. Two appear to be mating&uni$ue for caveart, Ramli points out. +nother, with a swollen belly, might be pregnant. e speculates that this is a

story of regeneration, the stuff of myth.>ast the pigs, a passageway leads to a deeper chamber where, at head height, there is a panel ofwell-preserved stencils including the forearms, which look as if they are reaching right out of thewall. Rock art is one of the most intimate archives of the past,/ +ubert once told me. It instills asense of wonder. e want to know) ho made it6 hy6/ The animal paintings are technicallyimpressive, but for me the stencils inspire the strongest emotional connection. 3orty thousand yearslater, standing here in the torchlight feels like witnessing a spark or a birth, a sign of something newin the universe. <utlined by splattered paint, fingers spread wide, the marks look insistent and alive.

hatever was meant by these stencils, there can be no stronger message in viewing them) e arehuman. e are here. I raise my own hand to meet one, fingers hovering an inch above the ancientoutline. It fits perfectly.

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a journey to the oldest cave paintings in the world

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