How old is the oldest cave painting

Over time, cave art began to feature human and animal figures. The earliest known cave painting of an animal, believed to be at least 45, years old, shows a Sulawesi warty pig. Sulawesi also has the first known cave painting of a hunting scene , believed to be at least 43, years old. The Lascaux paintings, discovered in when some teenagers followed a dog into the cave, feature hundreds of images of animals that date to around 17, years ago.

Many of the images in the Lascaux cave depict easily -recognizable animals like horses, bulls or deer. Another unique image has variously been interpreted as a hunting accident in which a bison and a man both die, or an image involving a sorcerer or wizard. In any case, the artist seems to have paid particular attention to making the human figure anatomically male. In North America, rock and cave art can be found across the continent, with a large concentration in the desert Southwest, where the arid climate has preserved thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs of ancient puebloan peoples.

But some of continent's the oldest currently known cave paintings—made approximately 7, years ago—were discovered throughout the Cumberland Plateau, which stretches through parts of Kentucky , Tennessee , Alabama and Georgia. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer.

In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. A section of the ancient cave art discovered in Indonesia that depicts a type of buffalo called an anoa, at right, facing several smaller human—animal figures. Credit: Ratno Sardi. The scientists say the scene is more than 44, years old. The 4. The scientists working on the latest find say that the Indonesian art pre-dates these. Other researchers say the discovery is important because the animal paintings are also the oldest figurative artworks — those that clearly depict objects or figures in the natural world — on record.

They suggest it might be a series of images painted over the course of perhaps thousands of years. The site, discovered in , includes hundreds of animal figures painted around 17, years ago. An image from the cave, and others from the same period, are widely considered to be the earliest known narrative artworks.

In the decades since, archaeologists have discovered even older rock art, dating to around 30, to 40, years ago, including depictions of animals and stylized symbols, in European caves such as Chauvet in France and El Castillo in Spain.

The Lascaux Caves in southwestern France feature clearly narrative scenes in rock art dated to around 17, years ago. Credit: Alamy. This site now represents the oldest evidence of humans in Wallacea, but it is hoped further research will help show people were in the region much earlier, which would resolve the Australia settlement puzzle. The team believes the artwork was made by Homo sapiens , as opposed to now extinct human species like Denisovans, but cannot say this for certain.

To make handprints, the artists would have had to place their hands on a surface then spit pigment over it, and the team are hoping to try to extract DNA samples from residual saliva. This article is more than 9 months old. He found that it is staggeringly ancient: at least 35, years old.

The findings made headlines around the world when Aubert and his colleagues announced them in late , and the implications are revolutionary.

They smash our most common ideas about the origins of art and force us to embrace a far richer picture of how and where our species first awoke. Studies of genes and fossils agree that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa , years ago. Intellectual breakthroughs in human evolution such as tool-making were mastered by other hominin species more than a million years ago. Such sophisticated thinking was a huge competitive advantage, helping us to cooperate, survive in harsh environments and colonize new lands.

It also opened the door to imaginary realms, spirit worlds and a host of intellectual and emotional connections that infused our lives with meaning beyond the basic impulse to survive. And because it enabled symbolic thinking—our ability to let one thing stand for another—it allowed people to make visual representations of things that they could remember and imagine.

Until Aubert went to Sulawesi, the oldest dated art was firmly in Europe. The spectacular lions and rhinos of Chauvet Cave, in southeastern France, are commonly thought to be around 30, to 32, years old, and mammoth-ivory figurines found in Germany correspond to roughly the same time.

So it has long been assumed that sophisticated abstract thinking, perhaps unlocked by a lucky genetic mutation, emerged in Europe shortly after modern humans arrived there about 40, years ago. Once Europeans started to paint, their skills, and their human genius, must have then spread around the world.

But experts now challenge that standard view. Archaeologists in South Africa have found that the pigment ocher was used in caves , years ago. They have also unearthed deliberately pierced shells with marks suggesting they were strung like jewelry, as well as chunks of ocher, one engraved with a zigzag design—hinting that the capacity for art was present long before humans left Africa.

Still, the evidence is frustratingly indirect. And the engravings could have been one-offs, doodles with no symbolic meaning, says Wil Roebroeks, an expert in the archaeology of early humans, of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Other extinct hominin species have left similarly inconclusive artifacts.

By contrast, the gorgeous animal cave paintings in Europe represent a consistent tradition. The seeds of artistic creativity may have been sown earlier, but many scholars celebrate Europe as the place where it burst, full-fledged, into view. Humans were more or less comparable to you and me. Yet the lack of older paintings may not reflect the true history of rock art so much as the fact that they can be very difficult to date. Radiocarbon dating, the kind used to determine the age of the charcoal paintings at Chauvet, is based on the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon and works only on organic remains.

This is where Aubert comes in. Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wanted to date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks in trace amounts. Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these two elements in a sample reveals its age; the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample.

But it can also date newer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively as speleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock. To do this would require analyzing almost impossibly thin layers cut from a cave wall—less than a millimeter thick.

Then a PhD student at the Australian National University in Canberra, Aubert had access to a state-of-the-art spectrometer, and he started to experiment with the machine, to see if he could accurately date such tiny samples.

Within a few years, Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong, where Aubert had received a postdoctoral fellowship—today they are both based at Griffith University—started digging in caves in Sulawesi. Brumm was working with the late Mike Morwood, co-discoverer of the diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis , which once lived on the nearby Indonesian island of Flores.