How old is human rock art?
An Australian-led team has dated cave art in Sulawesi at about 40,000 years old, putting it in the same vintage as the oldest known paintings in Spain and France. The images are spread across more than 90 sites in a limestone area 45 minutes’ drive from Makassar , Indonesia’s fifth-largest city. Archeologists have known of them for more than 50 years but assumed them to be less than 10,000 years old. Griffith University geochemist Maxime Aubert said he had first visited the site briefly, taking samples from a few caves. “I ran them in the machine and when I saw the numbers coming out, I thought, ‘Oh shit’,” he said. The study, dates the earliest image — a hand stencil — as at least 39,900 years old. The world’s oldest known cave painting, a red disc in Spain, is dated at 900 years older. The Sulawesi sites also include images of pig-like animals painted more than 35,400 years ago, possibly making them older than the earliest known figurative rock art in Western Europe — a painted...