A Little Curious #8: Cave Paintings Beyond Europe
Surprise! We’re re-introducing our short-form series, “A Little Curious,” which will give you sweet snippets of bonus content on the “off” weeks between our normal episodes. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our exploration of cave paintings, but we’re moving beyond France and Spain to tackle the oldest artworks in the world, found in Indonesia (and is the world’s oldest drawing from South Africa?).
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Episode Credits:
Production and Editing by Kaboonki.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Theme Music: "Snowmen" by Kai Engel is licensed under BY 4.0
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Links and further resources
New York Times: Oldest Known Drawing by Human Hands Discovered in South African Cave
Episode Transcript
Welcome, ArtCurious listeners, to the reintroduction of our bonus series from a couple of years back, A Little Curious. A Little Curious provides you with short and sweet bonus content about art history in between our normal episodes, and we’re doing things a little bit differently this time around. For the next few episodes of A Little Curious, we’re going all the way back--all the way back--to talk about ancient art. It’s a topic I’ve done very little on since beginning this podcast five years ago, and it’s about time we changed that--and that we share some fun details along the way. In our last episode we went long on cave paintings, often deemed the oldest of the old in art history--but the cave complexes we spoke about, based in France and Spain, are some of the most famous, but they are not the oldest in the world. So just after the break, it’s time to get a little curious about cave paintings beyond Europe. Stick around.
Sometimes there’s this feeling that history is somehow static, that something happened a long time ago, and that’s it. It’s the past. It’s history, and nothing about it really changes. The story remains the same. But what’s really fascinating is that history--the study of the past, as well as our understanding of events themselves--are actually fluid, changing all the time based on new findings, new discoveries, new evidence, and new points of view. What we might have included in a textbook on American art 30 years ago is, hopefully, not the same as what would be included today. Our view of history changes. And our view of art history changes as well. When I began studying art history as a college freshman, I know for sure that my courses began with a discussion about cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and moving on to Altamira in Spain. And from there, we jumped a little bit into the origins of what would later become known as European sculpture before transitioning to ancient Mesopotamia. Now, in the latest edition of the renowned art history textbook, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, Lascaux does lead the way--but not because it is the oldest cave painting. Instead, it’s a prime example of what cave painting was, and could be--it’s a framing device for the rest of the chapter on paleolithic art. The prized cave art found in those complexes in Western Europe date from around 40,000 to 35,000 B.C.E., which is no small feat--but just in the past decade, more and more discoveries have been made that are helping to rewrite the history of ancient art. And one of those discoveries was actually just reported early this year, in January 2021. On the island of Sulawesi, one of the islands of Indonesia, archaeologists discovered a wall mural of three pigs (little warty guys endemic to the region), depicted in deep red ochre. Though the wall painting isn’t in the greatest of shape--and more on that in a moment-- it is in just good enough condition that archaeologists have been able to make out that two of the pigs appear to be battling one another while the third looks on. And it looks to be at least 45,500 years old, according to a special kind of uranium dating--which is like the more familiar radiocarbon dating of past archaeological studies, except here the team analyzed the decay of traces of the element uranium, instead of carbon, hence the name. All of this leads up to a realization that these Sulawesi piggies predate the Hall of the Bulls from Lascaux (which we talked about last time on A Little Curious) by at least 20,000 years. And that means that these little piggies might just be the oldest art in the world-- or at least the oldest art yet discovered, because this lucky group of archaeologists, who come from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, has made incredible headway in Indonesia, nabbing the title of the discoverers of the “World’s Oldest Art” two times previously--once in 2014, with hand stencils from 40,000 years ago, and in 2019, with an awesome scene of warriors alongside a group of cattle and more of those wild pigs. It’s fascinating to see that the narrative is changing to expand ancient art history beyond Europe, but that the subject matter stays the same: in Indonesia, France, Spain, and elsewhere, we have scenes of animals and warriors that showcase early society’s hunter-gatherer lifestyles and the spiritual significance of those hunts, too.
But then a question still remains: how, exactly, do you define “art?” And no, this is not a trick question. And in fact, it’s a question that’s kinda hard to answer, if you really think about it, and one of my first seminars in art history began by asking this question and the class was pretty perplexed by it. But in this case, how do we know what is a work of art--meaning an object being created that showcases both skill and imagination in its making that’s meant to stand on its own, as a decorative or aesthetic object--when it was created so long ago? When is a handprint just a handprint on a wall, and when is it the beginning of cave painting? This question has been at the heart of debate about ancient art for a very long time, but the debate really began heating up in late 2018 when archaeologists announced the discovery of what they deemed the “World’s Oldest Drawing” on a small rock found in the Blombos cave in South Africa, about 200 miles east of the city of Cape Town. I’ll put images of this so-called “ancient drawing” on our website, artcuriouspodcast.com, as well as on Instagram and our other social media channels, but let me just give you a quick description: the rock has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it series of markings in good ol’ red ochre, featuring six lines crossed by three curvy lines. And according to an interview given to the New York Times, the researcher who discovered it, a man named Luca Pollarolo, realized quickly that this was a special rock, saying, quote, ““I think I saw more than ten thousand artifacts in my life up to now, and I never saw red lines on a flake,” with “flake” here being a small fragment of rock. He finished by saying, quote, “I could not believe what I had in my hands.”
Yet when you look at this rock flake, at this “ancient drawing,” it’s hard to know whether or not it is a drawing, or if it is just a bunch of random scratches. And that’s the tricky part, the challenge that archaeologists face through contextual clues, like where this rock was found, and what else surrounded it in that cave. Because to be able to argue that this is a drawing, they’re looking to argue that this is an image made with intent and imagination, and that’s a pretty big job. But here’s the thing: if a consensus is found and archaeologists are able to agree that these are indeed the world’s oldest drawings, then art history is rewritten once again, moving that timeline back over 30,000 years before those pigs and bulls and warriors in Sulawesi. Because these nine little red lines date to 73,000 years ago. And being able to establish that our ancestors, almost a hundred thousand years ago, were doodling away, could have huge ramifications for our understanding of human development, language development and the way symbols were used in the paleolithic era. And, of course, how we humans first started down this incredibly fascinating road of art history.
For more stories of the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history, subscribe now to the ArtCurious Podcast on the podcatcher of your choice, follow on Spotify, or download and listen in on our website, artcuriouspodcast.com. And before I sign off, I want to take this opportunity to thank our recent donor, Scott from Saline, Michigan, for his super-generous gift. Thanks incredibly much, Scott. If you want me to read your name on an upcoming episode, to support our show and do so tax-free, please follow our “donate” link on our website. I’ll catch you back here next week for our continuing series on “Cursed Art,” and again in two weeks for another little look at ancient art with A Little Curious.