Researchers have found prehistoric cave paintings on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia that might be even older than those found in Europe.
Archaeologist Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom is quoted as saying: “Until now, we’ve always believed that cave painting was part of a suite of complex symbolic behavior that humans invented in Europe. This is actually showing that it’s highly unlikely that the origin of painting caves was in Europe.”
Experts in Indonesia have known about the cave paintings for decades, but they had never been analyzed to see how old they are.
A recent study examined mineral deposit samples from the surface of the paintings to get an approximate date. Results of the study show that one of the hand stencils is at least 39 thousand years old, and the painting of a barirusa, or pig-deer is around 35 thousand four hundred years old.
The oldest known cave painting is the red disk in Spain that dates back to around 40 thousand years ago, but the hand stencils in Indonesia may be the oldest of their stylistic kind.
The paintings of the barirusa also might be the oldest figurative depiction ever discovered by archaeologists.
