Ancient art confirmed interesting facts about the acquaintance of people with the fauna of Indonesia

Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand are amazing places that are on the periphery of everything that has happened with the history of the Earth for thousands and millions of years. In the end, it was this part of the planet that remained the main oasis of marsupial mammals, which could not withstand competition with the placental on the rest of the continents. Here, human civilization also developed in a special way. One of the latest evidence is an amazing collection of prehistoric art and jewelry from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, the oldest of which date back 30,000 years.

Great resettlement from Africa

The first Homo sapiens reached Australia about 50,000 years ago. This was part of the Great Settlement of Man from Africa. It was previously believed that the culture of that time did not extend beyond India, the southeast Asian tropics and archipelagos east of Eurasia.

In 2014, breakthrough discoveries of cave art on the island of Sulawesi, which totaled 40,000 years, changed this point of view. The prehistoric art monument, which is considered one of the oldest in the world, is a unique collection of previously unknown symbolic objects found in one of the caves.

The restored artifacts dating from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago consist of separate beads made from fangs of babirussa (“pig-deer”) and pendants made from bone of the Sulawes bear bear couscous (a large and primitive opossum-like marsupial that lives only in Sulawesi), as well as jewelry - stones with geometric patterns, the meaning of which is unknown.

First meeting

The analysis allowed us to collect extensive data on the origin and execution of cave paintings, including scattered pieces of ocher and ocher spots on the instruments and the bone tube, which may have been used as a “tube for blowing” to create stenciled images of hands, the earliest of which was approximately in Sulawesi 40,000 years.

Thanks to the find, it became clear that the ancient art of the first people on the island included various "genres", and not just cave paintings. In addition, they say a lot about the fact that the first people on the island were impressed by uncharted creatures that lived only in these places. Indeed, in Sulawesi, all terrestrial mammals, except bats, have never been found on Earth before.

Researchers believe that these "symbolic negotiations" with new species could lay the foundation for the later settlement of Australia, which was inhabited by unprecedentedly rich communities of endemic fauna and flora. So a complex spiritual system of interaction between Aboriginal people and the animal kingdom could be laid down in Sulawesi.