Indonesian cave paintings explode Euro-centric theory of human art development

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Alessandra Kelley

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29415716

Cave paintings on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia have been dated to at least 40,000 years ago, the same age and in the same style as some of the earliest known cave paintings in Spain.

Previously the theory had been that humans in Europe developed art, which then spread across the globe.

Now it looks as though human art was a development of something earlier and elsewhere.

The discovery of 40,000-year-old cave paintings at opposite ends of the globe suggests that the ability to create representational art had its origins further back in time in Africa, before modern humans spread across the rest of the world.
 
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Layla Lawlor

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Oh, wonderful! I also saw these on ... tumblr, I think? The fact that humans were doing similar art across half the world at about the same time is so endlessly fascinating to me.
 

mirandashell

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Is it like the discovery of fire and agriculture? In that it happened in a lot of places at roughly the same time?
 

Layla Lawlor

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Basically! What's fascinating about that particular time period (around 40,000 BC and a few thousand years on either side of it) is that we, as a species, quantum-leaped from getting by with the same stone tools we'd been using for 1.5 million years, to making a ton of essentially modern stuff -- art, decoration, bows and arrows, boats, etc -- all over the place in a very compressed time frame. Why? How? Nobody knows! Humans evolved from proto-human ancestors to recognizably modern homo sapiens at least a hundred thousand years before that, so it can't be strictly a function of brain development.

There's a really interesting theory that it's something to do with a critical mass of population -- that you need a certain number of people living in an area before new inventions can spread widely enough to be adopted as a permanent part of the culture and passed down through the generations. For example, let's say Cavebob invents a new hunting weapon that throws spears a great distance! But in his little tribe of 50 people, no one else is interested. The old spears work fine, and the new weapon requires a lot of practice to use. So Bob dies, and his cool weapon is forgotten along with him. Or, say Bob's little tribe does actually adopt his weapon for a generation or two, but then the climate gets cooler and wetter, and the wide-open plains where they used to use the distance-hunting weapon are replaced by dense forests where flung spears are much less useful than hand-held spears, so everyone stops using the spear thrower and goes back to using their regular stabby spears, and in another generation, no one remembers how to make the thing.

Whereas, if you have 50,000 people living in an area, there is a great deal more innovation and exchange of ideas -- more people to be interested in a new invention, and to refine it, and to remember how to make it even after some of the tribes stop using it.

And maybe it's not so much a matter of brain capacity as of there finally being enough people around to have this stuff catch on when random isolated geniuses would figure it out.

(Er, sorry -- I'm sort of half-assedly working on an archaeology degree, so I'm way interested in this stuff. :D)

Bringing it back around to the forum topic, though, the sheer similarity of the art styles is absolutely fascinating, because Indonesia is nowhere near Europe! Clearly there was a great deal of very far-ranging idea exchange going on back then, even by our modern standards.
 
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mirandashell

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That's really interesting! And it makes sense. Every invention needs other people to use it. I've believed for a long time that the fire in at the Library in Alexandria set humanity back by many years because of the knowledge that was lost. And the easier it is to spread knowledge, the faster the world moves.
 
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