Cave paintings in Lubang Jeriji Saléh, a limestone cave in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, have been dated to at least 40,000 years ago.
A rock painting of a wild bovid from Borneo. Image credit: Pindi Setiawan.
Figurative cave paintings from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi date to at least 35,000 years ago and hand-stencil art from the same region has a minimum date of 40,000 years ago.
Griffith University’s Dr. Maxime Aubert and co-authors found that similar rock art was created during essentially the same time period on the adjacent island of Borneo.
Uranium-series analysis of calcium carbonate deposits that overlie a large reddish-orange figurative painting of an animal at Lubang Jeriji Saléh yielded a minimum date of 40,000 years ago, which is currently the oldest date for figurative artwork from anywhere in the world.
“The oldest cave art image we dated is a large painting of an unidentified animal, probably a Bornean banteng, a species of wild cattle still found in the jungles of Borneo — this has a minimum age of around 40,000 years and is now the earliest known figurative artwork,” Dr. Aubert said.
“The Kalimantan stencil art was shown to be similar in age, suggesting that a Paleolithic rock art tradition first appeared on Borneo between about 52,000 and 40,000 years ago. It then spread from Borneo into Sulawesi and other new worlds beyond Eurasia, perhaps arriving with the first people to colonize Australia.”
Dated rock art from Lubang Jeriji Saléh: photograph (upper image) and tracing (lower images) showing the locations of the dated speleothems and associated painting: a large in-filled reddish-orange-colored naturalistic depiction of an animal shown in profile; although the animal figure has deteriorated, Aubert et al interpret it as a figurative representation of what is possibly a wild bovid (Bornean banteng). Image credit: Aubert et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0679-9.
The analysis also indicated that a major change occurred within this culture around 20,000 years ago, giving rise to a new rock art style (including rare portrayals of humans) at a time when the global ice age climate was at its most extreme.
“Who the ice age artists of Borneo were and what happened to them is a mystery,” said co-author Dr. Pindi Setiawan, an archaeologist at Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia.
“The new findings illustrate that the story of how cave art emerged is complex,” added co-author Dr. Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a rock art expert at Indonesia’s National Research Centre for Archaeology.
Europe has long been seen as the center for cave art development.
But although Borneo is the Earth’s third largest island, throughout most of the Ice Age it actually formed the easternmost tip of the vast continental region of Eurasia.
“It now seems that two early cave art provinces arose at a similar time in remote corners of Paleolithic Eurasia: one in Europe, and one in Indonesia at the opposite end of this ice age world,” said co-author Dr. Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University.
The research is published in the journal Nature.
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M. Aubert et al. Palaeolithic cave art in Borneo. Nature, published online November 7, 2018; doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0679-9
Source link: https://www.sci.news/archaeology/figurative-paintings-borneo-06597.html
