The oldest cave art (and a UFO?)
Smithsonian magazine for January/February 2016 has an
article [The Awakening] by Jo Marchant (photography by Justin Mott)
about the world’s oldest representational paintings, found in an Indonesian
cave on the island of Sulawesi. [Page 80 ff.]
The paintings are of stenciled hands and animals:
Stenciled hands, as I’ve shown previously at this blog, are
endemic to cave art from all over the world.
Here are some ascribed to the Neanderthals, found at El
Castillo in Spain.
The Smithsonian article presents the Sulawesi art as the
oldest made by prehistoric man, about 38,000 B.C. but acknowledged that the
very oldest is at Castillo, made about 40,000 B.C.
The hand paintings, made, allegedly, by the “artists”
putting ocher in their mouths and blowing it over their hands.
The article also references a “red disk” in the Castillo
cave as the first painting made by man.
It’s actually a red dot (or dots) and its significance
remains a mystery.
(No, it’s not a representation of a flying disk or UFO,
although I had hoped it had some similarity to flying saucers as we know them
to be depicted.)
What I find interesting is that the stenciled hands found
everywhere in cave art are so delicate, not representing as I would imagine a
brutish appendage as one might expect from a Neanderthal or “cave man.”
Were cave artists mostly made up of delicate members of
prehistoric tribes or were they women or younger members of the clans?
And how did hands become a signifying aspect of cave art,
all over the world, in a time-frame of about 40,000 years to 37,000 years B.C.?
The article posits the migratory travels of primitive
mankind, moving from Africa upward to the Middle East and then to Europe or
eastward to India, and southward to Australia and, in this case, Indonesia.
The idea than early man moved all over the Eastern
hemisphere, leaving notifications of their arrivals and domiciles (in caves) by
way of handprints, I find intriguing.
Why not just a symbol or art print of another kind, a
particular animal, spear or arrowhead, or food-stuff or something else iconic
for early humankind?
Why no faces, or footprints (as easy to stencil, almost, as
a hand)?
And do the red dots or “red disks” (as anthropologists have
it) represent something more than a blotch of paint, like something seen in the
skies? (Alien Astronaut theorists will have a go at that I think.)
Here are some links to material relevant to this posting,
for those interested:
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, December 28, 2015
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