First Stories: The Ice Age Art of Sulawesi
The Chicago Council on Science and Technology, the Leakey Foundation, and the Field Museum present a lecture with Adam Brumm, professor of archaeology and founding member of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University.
In the 1950s, the discovery of prehistoric rock art was reported for the first time on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. These images were found in limestone caves in the karst hills of Maros-Pangkep. At the time, it was believed this art had been left by early Neolithic farmers, making them about 4,000 years old. However, in 2014, an Australian-Indonesian team dated the Maros-Pangkep art for the first time using a uranium-series analysis of natural mineral coatings that had formed on some of the images. The earliest dated image yielded a minimum age of 40,000 years, making it compatible with cave art in Spain, the oldest known art in the world at the time. The Sulawesi art therefore challenged the long-accepted story that the birthplace of human art and culture had been in Europe. The earliest painting, with a minimum age of 51, 200 years, is a scene portraying human-like figures interacting with a pig. It is the oldest cave art attributed to humans and the earliest known examples of visual storytelling in the world, providing crucial insights into the development of human cognition.
