Abstract
Studies of stencils and paintings from prehistoric caves in Indonesia date the art to at least 39,900 years ago — around the same age as the earliest cave art previously known, 13,000 kilometres away in western Europe. See Letter p.223 New dating results challenge the traditional view that western Europe was the centre of a crucial stage in the evolution of modern human intelligence and culture — based largely on the emergence of figurative or representational art in cave paintings and sculptures around 40,000 years ago. Dating data from a series of hand stencils and paintings of wild animals from caves in the Maros karst in Sulawesi, Indonesia, suggest that figurative art appeared at more or less the same time at opposite ends of the Late Pleistocene world. Or was cave painting practised by the first Homo sapiens to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier?
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