The oldest human-made drawing of an animal figurative painting has been discovered in a cave wall deep in the forests of the isle of Borneo which is at least 40,000 years old, confirmed the archaeologists in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The artwork draped in stone sheets and spindles which is a picture of wild cow-like beast, part of a large panel with three large animal and the pigment that comes from the iron oxide or ocher gives the painting its reddish-orange hue.The real objects are depicted rather than abstract shapes.
Humanity’s artistic heritage got a new historical milestone. The newly discovered picture is similar to other antic artwork of the other countries. The tucked within the outcrops is something even more spectacular with a vast and ancient gallery of cave art.
The caves in the southeast Asian island’s East Kalimantan has been known since the 1990s that contain thousands of images, ranging from primitive depictions of animals and humans to hand stencils and intricate motifs and providing exact dates for them has proved difficult. It was thought that they were relatively young which are about 10,000 years old.
“In the entrance, there’s a little chamber to the right, and it’s there—bam,” says archaeologist Maxime Aubert and his team says, but unlike earlier scribbles and tracings, these paintings are unequivocal depictions of ancient animals.
“The art also changes at about the same time. Initially humans made figurative painting of large animals and they later start depicting the human world.”
The researchers collected calcium-carbonate samples from the Kalimantan cave drawings so they could do uranium-series dating a technique made possible by radioactive decay. The figures also provide more evidence that an artistic flowering occurred among our ancestors, simultaneously, on opposite ends of the vast Eurasian continent.
The Borneo find compliments this earlier work and expands an increasingly broad and intriguing worldview of ancient art.
> Puza Sarker Snigdha
The Oldest Painting Discovered in Borneo Cave
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