New research has found that the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is home to the world’s oldest cave drawings, which means European paleolithic people were not unique—or even the first—to produce visual art.
A team led by archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University found that a hand stencil on Sulawesi dates back at least 39,900 years, about 2,000 years older than the oldest corresponding hand stencils in Europe. The researchers published their findings today in Nature.
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The discovery “allows us to move away from the view that Europe was special,” said Aubert of his team’s research, in a Nature statement. “There was some idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Now we can say that’s not true.”
Indeed, the Sulawesi drawings were originally discovered in the 1950s, but they were written off as being about 10,000 years old. Nobody had ever bothered to empirically date them until Aubert’s team calculated their true age with uranium-thorium dating. The discovery is expected to spark a total re-evaluation of ancient Asian cave drawings, which haven’t been as comprehensively studied as their European counterparts despite the eerily similar timeline and content.
For example, the Sulawesi cave walls are inked with stencils of hands, much like the “Panel of Hands” in the El Castillo Cave in Spain. The hand stencils of both caves were laid down approximately 40,000 years ago, and were followed by images of regional animals about 5,000-10,000 years after that.
In Europe, the images were of bison, aurochs, horses, and deer, while the Sulawesi caves display a 35,400-year-old painting of a babirusa, a species of pig.
There are also stylistic differences between European and Indonesian artistic techniques, with the Europeans looking more like fingerpainting, while the Indonesians may have used paintbrush strokes. But the fact that both cave peoples were inspired to paint hearty animals on their walls suggests that fantasizing about bacon and steak has a rich, shared history around the world.
The similarity in content and timeline may be evidence that the cave artists of Europe and Indonesia sprouted from a common, artistically literate African culture that predated them both by many millennia. The Europeans would have brought their techniques west while the Asians brought theirs east, though both would remain fairly preoccupied with drawing hands and animals.
This theory is exciting because it means that “we can expect future discoveries of depictions of human hands, figurative art, and other forms of image-making dating to the earliest period of the global dispersal of our species,” according to the Nature study.
the evolution of culture may have fundamental principles just as evolutionary biology does
But the alternative is just as promising. “It is possible that rock art emerged independently at around the same time and at roughly both ends of the spatial distribution of early modern humans,” said the authors. Maybe there is something innately inside of us that makes hand stencils and pig art a foregone conclusion. After all, it’s not like we even got over our obsession with immortalizing our hands, as evidenced by the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
By coincidence, another study released today actually tackled the question of whether a kind of convergent cultural evolution is common in our prehistory. Published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study compared cultural development in southeast Asia and sub-Saharan over the course of several millennia.
The authors concluded that linguistic, ethnographic, and technological changes were strongly correlated, which supports the theory that the evolution of culture may have fundamental principles just as evolutionary biology does, and artwork may be one of its most prominent byproducts.
But regardless of whether ancient cave art was inherited from a shared African culture or independently invented across the globe, its impact is the same. Looking at ancient hand stencils is a ghostly reminder that people from 40,000 years had many of the same creative needs as we do: to express themselves, to represent their world, and to communicate with the future. They were successful in all three, which is pretty damn impressive for the Upper Paleolithic.