investigator say they ’ve discovered the oldest known figurative cave art in the cosmos , which changes what we knew about the existence ’s first art .
nonliteral art is the drawing of tangible things , like a construction or person . And in a cave in Borneo , a team lead by Maxime Aubert from Griffith University in Australia say they ’ve chance a house painting of an beast that dates back at least 40,000 yr . Their determination are put out inNature .
" The oldest cave prowess image we dated is a large house painting of an unidentified animal , belike a species of wild cattle still feel in the jungles of Borneo – this has a minimal age of around 40,000 long time and is now the earlier known figural graphics , ” Aubert said in astatement .
The painting was found in the limestone cave of Borneo ’s East Kalimantan . Here there are thousands of rock music art trope of animals , man , boats , and more . But the age of these paintings was n’t previously known .
Usinguranium - series datingof Ca carbonate sample from one painting in especial , the team were capable to work out its age . They also dated two handwriting stencils to 37,200 years honest-to-god , and another to up to 51,800 years sure-enough . This run them to conclude that rock art recrudesce in Borneo about 52,000 to 40,000 age ago .
Interestingly , they also find evidence for a major change within the culture about 20,000 age ago . Around this time rare paintings of human start to seem , during a point when the clime was in the most uttermost wraps of an ice age .
In their paper the team mention that this suggest rock graphics come forth in Borneo at about the same time as in Europe , when modern humans arrive – about 45,000 to 43,000 years ago . Weirdly , this means similar cave nontextual matter at the same time sprung up in the extreme Dame Rebecca West and extreme eastern United States of Eurasia , with Borneo then being ascertain on the easternmost tip .
“ Whether this is a co-occurrence , the result of cultural convergence in wide split up regions , prominent - scale leaf migrations of a trenchant Eurasiatic population or another causa remains obscure , ” they remark .
This determination suggests that cave art did not begin in Europe , as once thought . Instead , “ ice age ” artists from Southeast Asia bring a key role , but small is known about them . “ Who the ice age artists of Borneo were and what happened to them is a mystery , ” Pindi Setiawan from the Bandung Institute of Technology ( ITB ) in Indonesia said in the assertion .
