1 hour agoShareSaveBecause Sulawesi lies on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, the dates have direct implications for assessing when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians first arrived.For years, the mainstream view – based largely on DNA studies and most archaeological sites – was that Homo sapiens first reached the ancient Australia–New Guinea landmass, Sahul, about 50,000 years ago. But with firm evidence that Homo sapiens were settled on Sulawesi and making complex symbolic art at least 67,800 years ago, it makes it much more likely that controversial archaeological evidence for humans in northern Australia by about 65,000 years is correct, according to Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of the Indonesia’s national research and innovation Agency (BRIN).”It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia.”Many archaeologists once argued for a European “big bang” of the mind because cave paintings, carvings, ornaments and new stone tools all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago, soon after Homo sapiens arrived there. Spectacular Ice Age cave art in places like Altamira and El Castillo encouraged the idea that symbolism and art switched on almost overnight in Ice Age Europe. Since then, engraved ochre, beads and abstract marks from South African sites such as Blombos Cave, some 70,000–100,000 years old, have shown that symbolic behaviour was already established in Africa long before.Along with very old figurative and narrative paintings from Sulawesi, a new consensus is being shaped; that there was a much deeper and more widespread story of creativity, Aubert told BBC News.”What it suggests is that humans would have had that capacity for a very long time, at least when they left Africa – but probably before that”. …
