An Ancient Cave

At another, hands are lined up in two horizontal tracks, all with fingers pointing to the left. Elsewhere there are hands with slender, pointed digits possibly created by overlapping one stencil with another; with painted palm lines; and with fingers that are bent or missing. Perhaps, he suggests, the stencils with missing fingers indicate that this practice too has ancient origins. Aboriginal Australian elders he has interviewed explain that their stencils are intended to express connection to a particular place, to say: This is my home.

There are two main phases of artwork in these caves. Alongside these are red and occasionally purplish-black paintings that look very different: The youngest stencil was dated to no more than 27, years ago, showing that this artistic tradition lasted largely unchanged on Sulawesi for at least 13 millennia. The findings obliterated what we thought we knew about the birth of human creativity. At a minimum, they proved once and for all that art did not arise in Europe.

By the time the shapes of hands and horses began to adorn the caves of France and Spain, people here were already decorating their own walls. On that, experts are divided. He points out that although hand stencils are common in Europe, Asia and Australia, they are rarely seen in Africa at any time. You have to find your way around, and deal with strange plants, predators and prey. Perhaps people in Africa were already decorating their bodies, or making quick drawings in the ground.

But with rock markings, the migrants could signpost unfamiliar landscapes and stamp their identity onto new territories. He thinks these techniques must have arisen in Africa before the waves of migrations off the continent began. The eminent French prehistorian Jean Clottes believes that techniques such as stenciling may well have developed separately in different groups, including those who eventually settled on Sulawesi. Far from being a late development, the sparks of artistic creativity can be traced back to our earliest ancestors on that continent. People arrived on Sulawesi as part of a wave of migration from east Africa that started around 60, years ago, likely traveling across the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula to present-day India, Southeast Asia and Borneo, which at the time was part of the mainland.

To reach Sulawesi, which has always been an island, they would have needed boats or rafts to cross a minimum of 60 miles of ocean.

Cave painting - Wikipedia

Brumm and his team have unearthed evidence of fire-building, hearths and precisely crafted stone tools, which may have been used to make weapons for hunting. Yet while the inhabitants of this cave sometimes hunted large animals such as wild boar, the archaeological remains show that they mostly ate freshwater shellfish and an animal known as the Sulawesi bear cuscus—a slow-moving tree-dwelling marsupial with a long, prehensile tail.

Ancient Sulawesians, it seems, were likewise moved to depict larger, more daunting and impressive animals than the ones they frequently ate. Aubert is collecting samples of limestone from painted caves elsewhere in Asia, including in Borneo, along the route that migrants would have taken to Sulawesi.

And he and Smith are also independently working to develop new techniques to study other types of caves, including sandstone sites common in Australia and Africa. Smith, working with colleagues at several institutions, is just getting the first results from an analysis of paintings and engravings in the Kimberley, an area in northwestern Australia reached by modern humans at least 50, years ago.

Or that competition with Neanderthals, present in Europe until around 25, years ago, pushed modern humans to express their identity by painting on cave walls—ancient hominin flag-planting. Clottes has championed the theory that in Europe, where art was hidden deep inside dark chambers, the main function of cave paintings was to communicate with the spirit world. Smith is likewise convinced that in Africa, spiritual beliefs drove the very first art. He cites Rhino Cave in Botswana, where archaeologists have found that 65, to 70, years ago people sacrificed carefully made spearheads by burning or smashing them in front of a large rock panel carved with hundreds of circular holes.

An ancient cave - Vashishta Gufa

There are also scattered fragments, probably dropped and splashed when the artists ground up their ocher before mixing it with water—enough, in fact, that this entire slice of earth is stained cherry red. Brumm says this layer of habitation stretches back at least 28, years, and he is in the process of analyzing older layers, using radiocarbon dating for the organic remains and uranium series dating of horizontal stalagmites that run through the sediment.

If religious belief played a part, it was entwined with everyday life. In the middle of this cave floor, the first Sulawesians sat together around the fire to cook, eat, make tools—and to mix paint. In a small hidden valley Aubert, Ramli and I walk across fields of rice in the early morning. Dragonflies glitter in the sun. At the far edge, we climb a set of steps high up a cliff to a breathtaking view and a cavernous entrance hall inhabited by swallows.

In a low chamber inside, pigs amble across the ceiling. Two appear to be mating—unique for cave art, Ramli points out. Another, with a swollen belly, might be pregnant. He speculates that this is a story of regeneration, the stuff of myth. Past the pigs, a passageway leads to a deeper chamber where, at head height, there is a panel of well-preserved stencils including the forearms, which look as if they are reaching right out of the wall.

We want to know: Forty thousand years later, standing here in the torchlight feels like witnessing a spark or a birth, a sign of something new in the universe. Outlined by splattered paint, fingers spread wide, the marks look insistent and alive. Whatever was meant by these stencils, there can be no stronger message in viewing them: I raise my own hand to meet one, fingers hovering an inch above the ancient outline.

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Our Reporter Was One of Them. Once thought to house the oldest representational art, the more than 1, paintings of predators like lions and mammoths are unmatched in their sophistication. Coliboaia Cave, Bihor, Romania. This cave, often flooded by an underground river, revealed images to spelunkers in —a bison, a horse, a feline and the heads of bears and rhinos. In this national park, paintings of jaguar, tapir and red deer shown here, c. Ubirr at Kakadu, Northern Territory, Australia. Aboriginal painters covered rock shelters over millennia with enigmatic beings and animals like the kangaroo here plus, much later, arriving ships.

Apollo 11 Cave, Karas, Namibia. Clustered in five natural rock shelters, paintings show large animal figures including the Indian lion and gaur an Indian bison , beside stick-like people. Cumberland Valley Caves, Tennessee, U. The art in this Appalachian valley shows the preoccupations of native Southeastern peoples, from hunting seen here to religious iconography. Muhammad Ramli, who has cataloged more than sites, treks to a cave called Leang Sakapao, near Maros. A headlamp illuminates ancient cave-art hand stencils inside Leang Sakapao. Stencils, like these in the Cave of Fingers, were made by placing the palm against the rock and blowing mouthfuls of paint over it.

Ramli speculates the locations of paintings within caves can help interpret their meanings. Those unlit in the morning or afternoon, he thinks, were likely religious. Animals like pigs and the anoa, sometimes called a dwarf buffalo, are interspersed with hand stencils made over thousands of years. Though not yet dated, the animals above are believed to be about 35, years old. Aubert points out a picture of mating pigs in Leang Sakapao. An Indonesian archaeologist examines art inside Leang Timpuseng. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today.

These findings support a theory of multiple comet impacts over the course of human development, and will probably revolutionize how prehistoric populations are seen.

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Their analysis including a clarification of earlier findings from stone carvings at Gobekli Tepe. Located in modern day Turkey, this site is dated to ca. In a previous study conducted by Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh , they interpreted this site as a memorial to a devastating comet strike around 11, BCE.

This strike is thought to have initiated a mini ice-age known as the Younger Dryas period, which began abruptly about 12, years ago and ended just as abruptly years later.

For this study, the team compared artwork in various locations with the positions of stars in ancient times, which they simulated using Stellarium 0. From this, they were able to decode what is perhaps the the best known example of ancient artwork — the Lascaux Shaft Scene , which is part of a series of cave paintings located in the Lascaux caves in southwestern France.

These paintings, which feature a dying man and several animals, may be an astronomical record of another comet strike that took place around 15, BCE. This sculpture is dated to 38, BCE, making it the earliest piece of evidence of prehistoric astronomy. What this reveals is that as early as 40, years ago, humans may have been keeping track of time based on how the position of the stars slowly changed over the course of thousands of years. The commonalities found between sites would also seem to indicate that these traditions survived the passage of time and were carried from place to place by prehistoric humans as they migrated.

In essence, ancient people may have had a far greater understanding of astronomy than previously thought. This could have drastic implications when it comes to our understanding of prehistoric human migration, since this knowledge could have aided navigation of the open seas. It could also help anthropologists further refine their theories of when migrations occurred. This, along with many findings over the past century across multiple disciplines, appears to be telling us that our ancient ancestors were far more knowledgeable than we gave them credit for.

And by learning more about them, we might even be able to learn something about ourselves.