Image by Ahdi Agus Oktaviana
Over the centuries, a variety of places have laid credible claim to being the world’s art center: Constantinople, Florence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten millennia, the hot spots become rather less recognizable. Up until about 20,000 years ago, it seems that creators and viewers of art alike spent a good deal in one particular cave: Liang Metanduno, located on Muna Island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province. The many paintings on its walls of recognizable humans, animals, and boats have brought it fame in our times as a kind of ancient art gallery. But in recent years, a much older piece of work has been discovered there, one whose creation occurred at least 67,800 years ago.
The creation in question is a handprint, faint but detectable, probably made by blowing a mixture of ochre and water over an actual human hand. To determine its age, researchers performed what’s called uranium-series analysis on the deposits of calcium carbonate that had built up on and around it.
The number of 67,800 years is, of course, not exact, but it’s also just a minimum: in fact, the handprint could well be much older. In a paper published last week in Nature, the researchers point out that its age exceeds both that of the oldest similar rock art found elsewhere in Indonesia and that of a hand stencil in Spain attributed to Neanderthals, “which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide.”
It isn’t impossible that this at least 67,800-year-old handprint could also have been made by Neanderthals. The obvious modification of the hand’s shape, however, an extension and tapering of the fingers that brings to mind animal claws (or the clutches of Nosferatu), suggests to certain scientific eyes the kind of cognition attributable specifically to Homo sapiens. This discovery has great potential relevance not just to art history, but even more so to other fields concerned with the development of our species. While it had previously been thought, for instance, that the first human settlers of Australia made their way there through Indonesia (in a time of much lower sea levels) between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, the handprint’s existence in Liang Metanduno suggests that the migration took place even earlier. All these millennia later, Australia remains a favored destination for a variety of immigrants — some of whom do their part to keep Sydney’s art scene interesting.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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