After all, the oldest artistic narrative in the world is not European.
Passionate about speleology (the science that studies caves and caves), Hamrullah She was tempted to climb a fig tree to get into a narrow opening of a cave from Sulawesi Indonesia Island.
What he found was unlike anything he had ever seen.
The painting he saw in the Leang Bulu’Sipong 4 cave may be completely changing our perception of the origins of human art and creativity.
Com 44 thousand yearscan be considered the older work of narrative art known in the worldwhich points to the strong possibility of our ability to tell stories through art has not originated in Europe, as always thought, but in Southeast Asia.
It is a brownish and reddish mural that tells a scene of hunting from Sulawesi native animals: wild pigs, but also Anoasa kind of endemic dwarf buffalo of the Indonesian region.
In painting, they are persecuted by what seem to be human with weapons, but also have traces of animals, such as tails and muzzles.
The Indonesian archaeologist responsible for the discovery admits that the figures start human, part of animals resemble Teriantroposmythological beings found in folklore all over the world.
“Pipocas” helped
Determining the age of primitive paintings is always difficult. Many donate made with coal or mineral -based pigments, which are difficult to date directly.
But in this case, the uranium and thorium dating techniques were resorted to Calcite deposits – better known in the middle like “popcorn” – who naturally formed about the work of art.
It was found that one of the designed pigs had been formed at least 43,900 years ago and two of the Anoas had deposits over 40,900 years.
The great mystery clings to mythology: the s Temntropes had no deposits of calcitis and so they could not be dated accurately-but the similarity in color and wear suggests that they were painted while animals.
“Tradition does not have its origins in Europe”
But beware: this is not definitely the world’s first design. An abstract sketch found in South Africa has 73 thousand years.
Sulawesi’s mural – where at least 242 caves and rocky shelters have been identified with similar works of art since 2014 – yes, yes, the oldest known example of a narrative scene, or history, portrayed in art.
In Europe, the Chauvet Cave in France and El Castillo in Spain have long been considered the cradle of figurative art, with paintings with 30 to 40,000 years, but the “popcorn” now tell us a different story in Indonesia.
“It has always been left of the principle that the tradition of figurative painting has emerged in Europe,” but these drawings of Sulawesi “show that tradition does not have its origins in Europe,” he underlines Alistair PikeArchaeologist at the University of Southampton not involved in the study.
However, scientists cited by All That’s Interesting remember that human animal hybrids in rock art have never been dated before 10,000 years ago.
“I had never seen anything like this before. I mean, we saw hundreds of rock art sites in this region, but we have never seen anything like a hunting scene, ”explained Brumm, a researcher at the Griffith University of Australia and co -author of the study in the journal Nature.
