Figurative animal paintings in Borneo (Lubang Jeriji Saléh)
- Date
- c. 40,000 years ago
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Island Southeast Asia (Borneo, Indonesia)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In the limestone caves of the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat karst of East Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, depictions of large wild cattle (likely banteng) were dated by uranium-series methods to at least about 40,000 years ago, with associated hand stencils possibly older still.
When announced in 2018 by the Aubert and Setiawan team, the Lubang Jeriji Saléh animal was hailed as the world's oldest known figurative painting, before still-older dates from Sulawesi superseded it. The Borneo and Sulawesi finds together demonstrate that a sophisticated tradition of figurative rock art existed in Wallacea and Southeast Asia at the same time as, or earlier than, the celebrated cave art of Europe. They also reveal a long sequence at these sites, with later phases shifting from reddish animal images to mulberry-coloured hand stencils and human figures, evidence of changing symbolic conventions over tens of millennia.
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Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic explosionc. 40,000+ years ago
- Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersalc. 70,000 to 50,000 years ago
- Göbekli Tepe: monumental architecture by hunter-gatherersc. 9,600 to 8,000 BCE
- World's earliest figurative and narrative cave art on Sulawesic. 51,000 to 45,500 years ago
- Chauvet Cave: early masterworks of figurative cave artc. 36,500 years ago
- Earliest Indus Script Signs Appear at Harappac. 3300 BCE
Essential reading
- The Pleistocene-Holocene boundary and the start of the Holocenec. 11,700 years ago (c. 9700 BCE)
- Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersalc. 70,000 to 50,000 years ago
- Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisationc. 2600 BCE
- Standardised Binary Weights System of the Indusc. 2600 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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