(Credits: Far Out / Brumm et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abd4648)
We Europeans always give ourselves way too much credit, when it should really be due elsewhere. This is definitely the case in the arts. As an Art History graduate, I can personally vouch for this, although I must say in recent years, universities have been making some effort to teach students artistic movements and practices outside the Western canon. Having said that though, my degree, like that of many others, is incredibly eurocentric.
During my four-year course, there were only a couple of modules to choose from that weren’t related to Europe, and I came to the conclusion that this was a result of two things: lack of research and financial investment into properly delving into non-European art so that it could be discussed in a classroom and a real European superiority complex. The latter fuels the former.
However, the more I learn about art, the more I realise Europeans owe so much, if not everything, to others. This couldn’t be more exemplified than in 2018 when the oldest (that we know of) cave painting was discovered in Indonesia.
Up until that point, Europeans were convinced that the oldest cave paintings were buried in the southern European mountains. In some ways, this is true, as many cave paintings have been discovered in the likes of Lascaux and Niaux in France, for example. However, given that all human life originated in Africa, it was only a matter of time before we would be proven wrong.
In November 2018, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, local scientists discovered a figurative cave painting of a stylised outline of a pig, exactly the way we would draw one today, with what seem to be three human figures.
The scientists confirmed the drawing to be at least 50,000 years old by using a laser to assess the calcium carbonate crystal that developed organically on the pigment of the drawing. To put this into perspective, our beloved Parthenon is a little over 2000 years old, and the Pyramids of Giza are roughly double that.
Now that you’ve processed the fact that we humans have been around for a long time, it’s clear that cave art existed on a completely different time scale — one that historians have often discounted because it feels too distant. In fact, cave art often falls into the hands of archaeologists and scientists and is outright excluded from art history.
However, many art critics have argued that this approach is fundamentally wrong. Cave art, especially that which portrays images of humans, animals and vegetation, is an essential part of art history, as it constitutes the first real example of visual storytelling. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much of a difference between a painting that illustrates a world war and a cave painting of primitive men fighting for land.
What’s fascinating about these first cave paintings is the way they visually explain the evolution of humans from Neanderthals to Homo Sapiens, particularly those who would have been passing through this region during their migration from Africa to Australia 60,000 years ago.
Narrative storytelling, which has become second nature to us today, like film, theatre, dance and the visual arts, was just as important to the earliest human cultures back then. As Professor Maxime Aubert from Griffith University in Australia described, “It shows that humans at the time had the capacity to think in abstract terms.”
In this way, we can feel much closer to our ancestors who came decades, even hundreds of centuries before us. Expressiveness, use of perspective, and colour are not techniques that we Europeans simply invented from our genius minds; they are innately part of the human being’s toolkit and have been used to tell our story from the very beginning of time.
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