Indonesian Cave Art May Be World's Oldest 77
sciencehabit writes The world's oldest cave art may not lie in Europe but rather halfway around the globe in Indonesia, according to a new study. The images date to around 40,000 years ago, making them a similar age to cave paintings from Western Europe that represent the world's oldest known cave art. The findings suggest that humans were producing figurative art by around 40,000 years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world. Further research is needed to investigate whether rock art was an integral part of the cultural repertoire of the first modern human populations to reach Southeast Asia from Africa, or whether these practices developed independently in different regions.
You mean... (Score:2, Funny)
6000 years ago, right?
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Prove that it isn't only 6,000 years old. You can't, the best that can be said is that it is consistent with what we would expect from something 40k old.
Indeed. Just as you using arguments consistent with what we'd expect from someone who is retarded, does not mean you are one.
It's just very probable.
Re: You mean... (Score:1)
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Well, I've got a bible right here, so there's all the proof a lot of people need...
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Such a small age for earth is typically accomplished by biblical reckoning... and it is achieved by adding up all of the time that elapses over the acocunted generations, plus the time it says that certain things took, it appears, by biblical reckoning only, that the world could not have been created any longer ago than in the vicinity of 6,000 to 7,000 years. This reckoning, however, assumes very important things, which one may or may not acc
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6000 years ago, right?
Prove that it isn't only 6,000 years old. You can't, the best that can be said is that it is consistent with what we would expect from something 40k old.
I thought the GP (AC) is making a joke, but the parent post (another AC) takes it a serious way...
Re:You mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Well. If it was painted by a dog, it would be just 5714.28571429 years old.
Re:You mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've made Bishop Ussher feel bad for the 10000'th time on Slashdot.
If you were under the impression you were making a point about theism in general, though, you aren't.
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I suspect the AC doesn't care much about Bishop Ussher, nor about theism in general, but according to a recent Gallup poll 42% of Americans agree with Ussher's conclusion.
That's a lot of people. People who deserve to have their feelings hurt, because they believe something stupid. Ussher was merely wrong; they are being stupid.
Not everybody proceeds to generalize that to every religious believer. That would be similarly stupid, an obvious fallacy. But the young-earth creationists are nearly a majority of Am
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Interesting. How many other questions of scientific fact are there for which you feel having an incorrect opinion, or no opinion at all, is worthy of personal attack?
Don't special-plead "creationism" here, tell me what's special about this, among all questions of science of which the general public is commonly incorrect about, -drawing only from science and the priorities of it-. Maybe you could mention some other scientific topics you commonly apply this necessity of derision toward when you encounter th
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Noted. For the record.
No, not that one.
As for your objectives, given all I need to do is wait, and I win, even according to -you-, you might want to reconsider your strategic plan here.
Wait, which is it? (Score:1)
Oldest or same age?
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Alright, so say you and I are both in the same graduating class of high school. For all intents and purposes we're the same age, but one of us is technically older.
The implications of one being the technically older find aren't important as far as anthropological inferences are concerned, but might matter for bragging rights of the countries and researchers involved.
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Yeah, and the great pyramids are just really big, really old, tombstones. People just tend to like old things, even if it's irrational.
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Nah, it's actually pretty important in that it's busting the chops of some really old Eurocentricism, that was still somehow moderately popular in Academia, namely that a lot of the things we associate with culture entirely originated with humans that migrated to Europe(frequently called Indo-Europeans). And this find basically asserts that art, at least, was more widespread and human that anthropologists were giving it credit for.
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Actually, the Indo-European peoples arose somewhere around 5000 to 6000 years ago. The first cave art in Europe predates Indo-Europeans by tens of thousands of years. If you buy into Nostratic, maybe the people that made the European cave art spoke some language ancestral to that group, but the Indo-European language group, indeed likely any of the language families spoken in the last 10,000 years, had not evolved yet.
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You're right. I was wrong there.
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You're right. I was wrong there.
You obviously have no business posting on /.
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Well, actually there is some significance here, in that it suggests that the neurological innovations that lead to modern human behaviors like art and symbolism arose among the ancestral populations to both the first modern humans in Europe and in Asia. If nothing else, it falsifies the few remaining wingnuts who believe Europeans are somehow unique.
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As I wrote in another post, the evidence all points to art and other forms of symbolism evolving among modern human populations prior to their departure from Africa. The Blombos Cave site suggests the first use of pigments at least as far back as 70,000 years, and perhaps as earlier as a 100,000 years ago. The cognitive rewiring seems to have been completed in Africa.
Aew we sure (Score:4, Funny)
Aew we sure that it was art by Homo Sapiens?
Wasn't there an island in Indonesia that had Hobbits?
Re:Aew we sure (Score:4, Interesting)
"Homo Sapiens" is an arbitrary construct, as is the rest of Linnaean Taxonomy.
Adding the use of Latin to make it sound extra-authoritative doesn't change this. Using the names of Sonic the Hedgehog characters for species names, as one biologist did, is equally scientific and more entertaining, though.
Cladistics might find something resembling an objective differentiator, but I'm betting against it.
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...and if that gets solved, it will be solved via cladistics, not arbitrary opinions of inclusion or exclusion within made-up names of made-up categories, such as "Homo Sapiens".
It's that assumption of the original question I was responding to.
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They are useful for a great many purposes, yes. For the actual purpose of the actual question asked in particular, this particular naming convention isn't useful at all.
But, some are under the misunderstanding that this naming convention represents "the way things really are" (apparently, such as the person asking) rather than "a grouping of names of categories formed based on largely-arbitrary criteria".
You seem inordinately upset by this. Sorry if I disturbed your unthinking acceptance of your preferred
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Pfft.
Are you done trolling me? There was nothing of substance you have to respond to, claiming I'm "burying myself" is nonsensical, and your perceptions of "random" are really poor.
Seems like a non-optimal use of your limited time, really.
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Re:Bollocks (Score:4, Informative)
Art? (Score:2)
These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
The cave paintings in France [experienceardeche.com] are definitely art and were created around the same time.
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Can your dog do that? Even a Chimp? No? Then they are important and a sign that something interesting was going on.
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Chimps can, elephants can, even dogs can. Draw, that is. Sometimes their drawings make sense because our brains force otherwise random lines into known shapes.
Or they actually do draw... better than me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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It's just my opinion, but I'm not sure that any of those exercises show that a chimp, elephant or dog can draw or paint, if you define paint as something more ephemeral.
I mean, they can be trained to put a brush in ink and put the inky brush on canvas - perhaps even amuse themselves with the process - but I'm not sure it qualifies as anything beyond repeating a mechanical process that obviously pleases the trainer and nets the animal bananas, peanuts, or kibble. Drawing or painting only transcends the mech
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The GP question was whether they can do it, not whether they could do it by themselves. My response wasn't denying the importance of the discovery, merly was pointing out that a broad statement (can an animal draw?) can be easily proved wrong.
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Re:Art? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the issue here is the artistic merit of it.
But for humans(*) to have the abstract concepts of representing things in the world around them, the dyes needed to do this, and the desire to actually put this kind of thing on a wall ... well, that's indicating that humans(*) were far more advanced than everybody thinks they were.
If the ability to do the art spread with humans(*), then we learn a little more about how we got here and what we knew.
At a minimum you have to conclude there was some form of culture, shared understanding of concepts, and a desire to communicate and have things a little more durable.
As opposed to the previous notions of cavemen sitting around poking themselves in the eye with sticks and looking all furry and stuff. This might actually suggest that humans were more advanced, and more widespread, than we initially thought.
(*)humans, proto humans, early humans ... whatever, don't care.
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The "dye" is ochre, dirt. The other two I'll concede readily.
And natural copper is just a rock. That they mined it, probably modified it into powder, and used it for a specific purpose pretty much makes it in the same space as taking natural copper and pounding it into jewelry or an axe head.
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I think I see an animal in there. It's heavily obscured by fungus, bat guano or something. Look to the left and you see a couple of skinny legs or tree like things. Look to the upper right and you see a head. It might be depicting a flightless bird or something. Needless to say, it needs serious conservation since it's just been discovered. I don't know what if any cleaning was done in France.
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I think I see an animal in there...
You're right. It's a (now nearly extinct) Babirusa or ‘pig-deer’:
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-6... [guim.co.uk]
...and it's actually a very accurate representation:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GScX... [blogspot.com]
They do a good job of cleaning it up in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
The cave paintings in France [experienceardeche.com] are definitely art and were created around the same time.
The Sulawesi art is very definitely representational art [nationalgeographic.com] not just "tossing pigments" around. The cave paintings in France have those same hand print patterns [culture.gouv.fr] you try to dismiss as "not art". Your bias against this artwork seem unsupported by facts.
Rock art (Score:4, Funny)
Fuck yeah, headbangers!
Sea levels were so low (Score:3)
at that time, Indonesia was connected to Malaysia/Singapore and thus the Asian continent. Map [iceagenow.com]
Not sure what this proves, but is interesting...
Shocking (Score:3, Funny)
Travel (Score:2)
I'm amazed that all the archeologists make presumptions that things were slow to spread. It only takes a few years, decades at most to walk from Europe to Asia. Humans are intelligent. Once shown a new and nifty idea I'm sure they thought "Pfft! I can do that!"
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Or there may have been a tradition of this type of art dating back to a time before human populations migrated to different parts of the globe. We just haven't found anything older yet.
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I would think you'd have to find older art in Africa or the Middle east that predated known findings of humans in other parts of the globe. Rough task.
The similarities are fascinating (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, the most fascinating thing about this story are the similarities between the Indonesian paintings and the European paintings, and that they are about the same age. It would seem that this style of artwork would be much older, and from a time before humans had migrated to those opposite corners of the world.
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Copyright infringement. I say we call out the lawyers.
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Re:Not really the oldest!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Neither is the oldest evidence of symbolism. The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, where the first evidence of the use of pigments (in this case ochre) are at least 70,000 years old.
Australian Aborigines (Score:4, Informative)
It's funny how even scientists tend to forget about the Australian Aborigines. They actually would have migrated through Indonesia approximately 10,000 years before this painting was made. They have a well documented history of making paintings exactly like the ones shown in this cave.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... [abc.net.au]
Aboriginal hand paintings:
https://www.google.com.au/sear... [google.com.au]