11 December
According to the anthropologist Desmond Morris: art, with science and religion, is one of our essential needs.
And humans are the only species on Earth capable of producing art.
His definition for art is “making the extraordinary out of the ordinary to entertain (or exercise) the brain”. Brain entertainment is a pleasure but it is also at the core of our evolutionary success.
Indeed, we have made art since a long time. On 11 December 2019 the discovery of the earliest known imaginary rock-art was announced.
Images of figures that do not exist in the natural world, part humans and part animals, or mixtures of different animals, It is the evidence for our ability to imagine the existence of supernatural beings, a cornerstone of religious experience.
Imaginary creatures occur in the folkore or narrative fiction of almost every modern society and they are perceived as gods, spirits or ancestral beings.
Caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia, are known to be rich with rock-art. The latest discovery there showed that what has been documented there is the oldest image of this kind and is about 44.000 years old.
This cave painting portrays a group of part-human, part-animal hunters facing large mammals with spears or ropes, casting new light on the origin of modern human cognition.
But the scientist in you is certainly asking: how did they date them? Indeed only specialists are familiar with this that is an indirect method. What is dated is actually the calcium formation which grew on top of the figures. The Uranium–Thorium dating is a radiometric technique established in the 1960s to determine the age of calcium carbonate materials such as speleothem or coral.
There is so much humans have done for the pure pleasure of entertaining the brain!
In the picture: a group of part-human, part-animal hunters facing large mammals, rock-art Sulawesi, Indonesia
