Still there, still the same team of researchers behind the discovery. The announcement is the one destined, once again, to rewrite our distant past artistic. Although it is not clear, however, they let the researchers themselves understand, because the region where everything happened is confirming itself as a real treasure chest in the field of rock art and could reserve further surprises. What are we talking about? The discovery of the oldest testimony of figurative art, in an Indonesian cave on the island of Sulawesi by the team of Adam Brumm of Griffith University, Australia.
Just over a year ago, Brumm’s team ended up at the center of the attention of anthropology enthusiasts for the announcement that a 44,000-year-old rock painting had been discovered in Sulawesi, a painting featuring a hunting scene of local animals by human-like figures. Figures so particular that at the time they had intrigued the insiders, who had also hypothesized a religious significance associated with them.
But excavations and research in the same area lead today to overcome the primacy of that hunting scene as a figurative art, as the researchers tell us on the pages of Science Advances. In fact, in the same area – a karst area in the south of the island of Sulawesi, known as Maros-Pangkep – Brumm’s team has identified two new interesting animal figures. These are probably representations of the Sulawesi warted boar (pig celebensis), but of different ages, as estimated thanks to the radiodating analyzes carried out on the deposits above the drawings (as carried out in the past).
The one at the site of Leang Balangajia 1, depicting a boar with some stencils of hands, has an estimated minimum age of about 32,000 years. The one at the Leang Tedongnge site, on the other hand, could have a minimum age of about 45,000 years, and thus be, albeit slightly, older than the hunting scene. Protagonists of the painting, in shades of red, also in this case are stencils of hands and some wild boars, three in all, perhaps engaged in what the researchers describe as a social interaction. Which from today could become particularly famous. According to what the experts write, in fact, we could be facing not only the oldest painting of an animal, but the oldest known testimony of figurative art, made, in all probability, by members of our species, cognitively and anatomically modern. And all this, the authors conclude, only confirms that the act of depicting stories through these representations was part of the cultural baggage of the populations of this place in this period.
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