Science and technology | Ancient art

Old masters

It emerges that cave paintings in Indonesia are among the oldest ever seen

THE Pleistocene cave paintings of western Europe have a special place in the history of art. Those images—which date back as much as 40,000 years—are the oldest known examples of pictures made with pigments. Or rather, they were. This week, a study published in Nature by Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm of the University of Wollongong, in Australia, and colleagues shows that some paintings in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia are equally ancient.

The images themselves are not new discoveries, but they had not until now been properly dated. The team did so by collecting calcite which had been deposited on top of the images and using traces of uranium within the mineral as a radioactive clock. They have shown that one image, the outline of a hand, is at least 39,900 years old. That is older than similar hand outlines in European caves, and only a smidgen younger (and the dating is not perfectly accurate) than some abstract dots found in a cave in Spain. Several other pictures (including that illustrated above, of a babirusa, a type of pig) date back more than 35,000 years.

Other, more recent rock paintings exist in Africa and Australia, but the dating of the Sulawesi images, located so far away from their European contemporaries, suggests this sort of art was already part of mankind’s repertoire when the species left Africa, about 60,000 years ago. Though there is some evidence of primitive art created by Neanderthal man, the distinction between these beautiful paintings (and those of Europe), and the crude, abstract Neanderthal grid pattern recently discovered in a cave in Gibraltar serves to illuminate the mental gap between the two species.

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