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Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia

Aubert, M., Brumm, A., Ramli, M., Sutikna, T., Saptomo, E. W., Hakim, B., Morwood, M. J., van den Bergh, G. D., Kinsley, L., Dosseto, A.·2014·Nature
DOI 10.1038/nature13422
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Abstract

Archaeologists have long been puzzled by the appearance in Europe ∼40-35 thousand years (kyr) ago of a rich corpus of sophisticated artworks, including parietal art (that is, paintings, drawings and engravings on immobile rock surfaces) and portable art (for example, carved figurines), and the absence or scarcity of equivalent, well-dated evidence elsewhere, especially along early human migration routes in South Asia and the Far East, including Wallacea and Australia, where modern humans (Homo sapiens) were established by 50 kyr ago. Here, using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In addition, a painting of a babirusa ('pig-deer') made at least 35.4 kyr ago is among the earliest dated figurative depictions worldwide, if not the earliest one. Among the implications, it can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art by ∼40 kyr ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world.

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Crossref · 10.1038/nature13422

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  • Sulawesi has been the focus of many archaeological excavations since the 1960s and has received increasing attention recently, with some of the oldest dates (ca. 40.7 ka) for early modern human occupation in Wallacea located just south of the modeled path.

    “Sulawesi has been the focus of many archaeological excavations since the 1960s (O'Connor and Bulbeck, 2014;Brumm et al., 2017;Bulbeck et al., in press), and has received an increasing amount of attention recently with some of the oldest dates (ca.40.7 ka) for early modern human occupation in Wallacea located just south of our modeled path (SOM Fig. S1; Aubert et al., 2014)”

    From Least-cost pathway models indicate northern human dispersal from Sunda to Sahul (2018) · cites this paper as Aubert et al., 2014

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Metadata

Authors
Aubert, M., Brumm, A., Ramli, M., Sutikna, T., Saptomo, E. W., Hakim, B., Morwood, M. J., van den Bergh, G. D., Kinsley, L., & Dosseto, A.
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2014-10
Volume
514
Issue
7521
Pages
223-227
ISSN
  • 0028-0836
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/nature13422
Cited by
414
References
2
Language
en
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)

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