Laser-induced imaging of radioactive elements was used to work out the age of an ancient cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The results reveal that the narrative scene is 51,200 years old, making it the earliest known example of representational art. This study challenges previous dating methods and suggests a deeper origin for human image-making and storytelling.
TL;DR or if you don’t have access to the article: the researchers invented a faster, less-destructive and more-accurate rock art dating method & applied it to humanity’s oldest known rock art in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The art is at least 51,200 years old (authors’ lower estimate)!
Edit: contrary to what the news title original stated: this is the oldest representational art, not the literal oldest human-created art.
The paper itself (open access): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7
Cool.
Title might be a bit clickbait though.
It’s oldest known representational art. Not oldest known art.
For example the carvings in the Blomos cave in South Africa are atleast 75’000 years old.
Edit: Thank you for editing the title! That’s pretty weird mistake by Nature I thought they had high standards. Well they have peer reviewed and approved some dodgy research in my field recently so maybe I should be more skeptical.
I love hearing stuff like this. 51, 000 years old is already insane. 75,000 years old is 24,000 years older than that. I can’t even imagine 24,000 years older than today.
Why can’t we get movies about this shit instead of another Marvel sequel? I want some scientifically accurate adventure about life in 73,000 BC.
Quest For Fire.
Well the problem is we know very little. So a movie like that would be complete guesswork.
You might enjoy the youtube channel “Stephan Milo” though. His videos are well sourced and have a lot of expert interviews. And he focuses on this kind of stuff.
Red ochre use has been happening for like 300k years, we just don’t have any examples of the art that survived.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just put on a label with the date?
Did the entire department author that paper?
Multiple techniques, multiple field sites, new, advanced method used… Not a surprising author list.
This is a good point… I’m more used to biomedical papers where this author list would be considered typical or even short, but yeah the affiliations seem to state that there are four PIs on this paper which is wild… don’t know what to make of it. If someone knows archaeology better plz inform
