Year in review: Asian cave art got an early start
Hand stencils revise painting history
By Bruce Bower
12
Ancient cave art went global in 2014. Scientists reported that Stone Age cave painting began at about the same time in Southeast Asia as in Europe. These findings suggest the need to rethink a decades-old conviction that Western Europeans cornered the market on creativity with their cave paintings about 40,000 years ago, millennia before groups elsewhere started drawing on rock walls.
Famous cave paintings in France and Spain were taken down a notch in significance thanks to new dates for a couple of human hand outlines previously discovered inside caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Archaeologists Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, both of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, led the effort that dated one Sulawesi hand stencil to at least 39,900 years ago and another to at least 39,400 years ago (SN: 11/15/14, p. 6). Stone Age islanders made those and many other hand stencils by blowing, spraying or spitting liquid pigment around an outstretched hand pressed against a cave wall.