Asian cave paintings challenge Europe as cradle of art

Yahoo – AFP, Mariette Le Roux, 8 Oct 2014

This handout picture released by the journal Nature, on October 8, 2014, shows a 

hand stencil found on a cave wall in Maros karsts on the Indonesian island of 

Sulawesi (AFP Photo/Kinez Riza)

The silhouette of a hand on a cave wall in Indonesia is 40,000 years old, showing that Europe was not the birthplace of art as long believed, researchers said on Wednesday.

Created by spraying reddish paint around an open hand pressed against rock, the stencil was made about the same time -- and possibly before -- early humans were leaving artwork on cave walls around Europe that was long thought to be the first in the world.

In the same cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a painting of a pig was dated to about 35,000 years ago, the Indonesian and Australian team reported in the journal Nature.

The discovery, they said, throws up two theories, both of which challenge the conventional wisdom around the history of human artistic expression.

Art either arose independently but simultaneously in different parts of the world -- or was brought by Homo sapiens when he left Africa for a worldwide odyssey.

"Europeans can't exclusively claim to be the first to develop an abstract mind anymore," Anthony Dosseto of Australia's University of Wollongong said in a statement.

"They need to share this, at least, with the early inhabitants of Indonesia."

Anthropologists consider rock art to be an indicator of the onset of abstract thinking -- the ability to reflect on ideas and events.

Recasting human evolution

Dosseto and a team dated 12 hand stencils and two animal likenesses found at seven cave sites on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

The ancient images were discovered more than 50 years ago, but had never been accurately dated.

This handout picture released by the journal Nature, on October 8, 2014, shows

 hand stencils marking a cave wall in Maros karsts on the Indonesian island of

 Sulawesi (AFP Photo/Kinez Riza)

It had been widely assumed that anything older than 10,000 years would have eroded away in the tropical climate.

The team measured the radioactive decay of trace amounts of uranium found in small stalactite-like calcite growths called "cave popcorn" that had formed a layer less than 10 millimetres (0.38 inches) thick over the art.

The method produced minimum estimates for the works' ages, and the pieces could in fact be much older, said the team.

The stencil is now officially the oldest known specimen of the hand silhouette art form, they reported.

And the depiction of a fat-bellied babirusa "pig deer", its four legs, head, tail and lines of hair still clearly visible, is one of the earliest known depictions of an animal, "if not the earliest".

"It can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art about 40,000 years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world," the team wrote.

The previous oldest cave art was from El Castillo cave in northern Spain, including a hand stencil dated 37,300 years ago, according to Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University, who wrote a comment on the study.

The oldest known animal painting was of a charcoal rhino in the Chauvet Cave in France, dated to 35,300-38,827 years ago. Traces of red paint about 36,000-41,000 years old were found in Fumane, Italy.

Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist at Britain's Natural History Museum, said the new data suggested that early humans were already artists when they spread out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

"I think some of the art in Australia will also eventually be dated to this very early time," he said in a video distributed by Nature.

The findings "stress the great relevance of Asia, and especially southeast Asia, for the study of human evolution," added Roebroeks.

"Compared with Europe, Asia has seen little fieldwork, and new finds will keep on challenging what we think we know about human evolution."

Related Article:

"The Big Picture - You Are Not Alone" - Feb 2012 (Message from Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“..  Your Story

Several hundred thousand years ago, Humans began to form into the Human that you recognize today. That's just yesterday. Don't confuse this with Human development. You have had that going on for a very long time. But the DNA that is within your body is not the DNA that developed naturally on the planet. Yours is outside of the system of Earth-based evolutionary processes, and the scientists are starting to see this. The "missing link" that they speak of is not Human.

So again, we tell you that the ones who came to help seed you approximately 100,000 to 200,000 Earth years ago were the Pleiadians who had gone into graduate status and who had changed consciousness. They had become quantum with free choice, and you have parts of their DNA within you.

New information for you: The seeding process was not a one-time event. This is why we give you these large sections of time where the Pleiadians worked with you. It was done over time and in many places. It was not all simultaneous, and this was for reasons that will remain unknown to you for now, but will later explain why you will find other Human types that now are extinct. Now you only have one Human type, and that is counterintuitive to all mammal development on the planet. This was a design, and it took more than 100,000 years to create this for humanity as you know it.

It's your Human bias that has the creation story of the knowledge of light and dark being given to Humans in one day in a garden involving a talking snake and other mythology. Spiritual logic should tell you that these stories are simply metaphors of a real truth, that indeed there was a major shift of consciousness, but over a longer period of time and not instantly. The same mythology has the earth created in seven days. However, this only represents a numerological truth [7 is the number of divinity], meaning that there was a divine design in the creation of the planet. It's time to start using spiritual logic within the teachings you have about spiritual history, for the revelations will be wonderful and lead to fuller understanding.

Now, what really is in your DNA? It's the Pleiadians' code, and it's the ones before them, and even the ones before them. You can't remember it, for that is not the set-up. The system is that your Akashic record is only from Earth, but your "divine remembrance" will take you back to the beginning, where system after system after system created that which you see as the divinity within the galaxy and the Universe.

Who are they? They're your "divine" parents. They're the seed divinity in you and they visit here. They're not all Pleiadians, did you know that? Instead, they're from all over the galaxy. You see, they also represent the seeds of the Pleiadians, and they keep you safe. You wouldn't have it any other way, would you? "Safe from what?" you might ask. ….”

"The Timing of Creation"– Aug  12, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) - (Text version)