All thanks to ancient wasp nests. Yes, the discovery of the oldest painting in Australia is also thanks to those ancient wasps. Because it is by dating their mud nests that some researchers have been able to determine the age of some aboriginal rock paintings, and to discover, with little surprise, that so far the oldest Australian one represents, needless to say, a kangaroo.
The dating of the rock paintings is not simple, they recall at the opening of their work, published on Nature Human Behaviour, the experts. In fact, it is rarely possible to trace remains in the pigments that allow dating analysis.More often the age of these ancient artistic testimonies are extrapolated by referring to the context and analysis of mineral accretions or, as in this case, grown wasp nests above and below the paintings. It is thus, thanks to the radiocarbon method, that the researchers led by Damien Finch of the University of Melbourne have managed to place over time a series of Aboriginal paintings whose age until now was far from clear.
These are paintings from the Kimberley region, in the northern part of Western Australia, generally referred to belong to the so-called naturalistic period, characterized by mostly natural figures, such as plants and animals, some stencils of hands and objects and rarely anthropomorphic figures, explain the authors. With a style, we read in the paper, similar to what is revealed in other cave paintings around the world, both for anatomical characteristics and for the representation of figures of similar size to reality. From the analysis of the 16 figures taken into consideration, the experts deduced that they were painted in a period between about 17 thousand and 13 thousand years ago. And among these, one in particular is noteworthy, that of a kangaroo about two meters long, on a sort of rocky ceiling, as Finch explained: “We dated three wasp nests below and three above nests to determine, with certainty, that the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; more likely 17,300 years ”. An age that makes that of the kangaroo, the team explains, the oldest rock painting ever dated in situ in Australia.
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But nothing excludes that there are also older paintings in the area, as he added Sven Ouzman of the University Western Australia, among the authors of the paper: “This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to the rock paintings of the islands of Southeast Asia that are more than 40 thousand years old, suggesting the cultural link and suggesting the existence of rock art even older in Australia ”. Obviously declined in a local way: where wild boars, where kangaroos.
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