Ancient cave drawings in Indonesia are as old as famous prehistoric art in Europe, according to a new study. This shows that our ancestors were drawing all over the globe some 40,000 years ago.
Based on levels of decay of the element uranium, archaeologists calculated that a dozen stencils of hands in mulberry red and two detailed drawings of an animal described as a "pig-deer" are between 35,000 to 40,000 years old, according to the Associated Press.
Until now, researchers had credited humans in Europe with the invention of cave painting 5,000 to 40,000 years ago. This means that the art found in Sulawesi, southeast of Borneo, was completed around the same time period as drawings found in Spain and a famous cave in France.
One of the Indonesian handprints, which is at least 39,900 years old, is now the oldest hand stencil known to science, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The new art "changes our view of when and where humans became completely modern," says Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Australia's Griffith University and a co-author of a study in this week's Nature reporting the new dates, according to the Associated Press.
The old view "led people to believe that our species became aware of ourselves, became modern, in Europe. Now we can show that's not true," the archaeologist added.
Antique paintings sprawl across 100 caves and rock shelters in Sulawesi, a large island in the Indonesian archipelago.
All of the paintings were dismissed as "recent" creations when they were discovered in the 1950s.
When Aubert processed samples of minerals from atop a few paintings, he was pleasantly surprised.
"I looked at the numbers and said, 'Whoa, that's pretty old!'" he said, according to the Associated Press.
Paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York, who wasn't part of the study, said this is an important discovery because it changes what science thought about early humans and art.
"What this tells us is that when humans began moving out of Africa they were not all that different from us in terms of their abilities to use art and symbol," Shea said in an email to the Associated Press. "Inasmuch as many of us would have difficulty replicating such paintings, they may even have been our superiors in this respect."
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