Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art

8 October 2014 Last updated at 18:05

By Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have identified some of the earliest cave paintings produced by humans.

The artworks are in a rural area on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi.

Until now, paintings this old had been confirmed in caves only in Western Europe.

Researchers tell the journal Nature that the Indonesian discovery transforms ideas about how humans first developed the ability to produce art.

Australian and Indonesian scientists have dated layers of stalactite-like growths that have formed over coloured outlines of human hands.

Early artists made them by carefully blowing paint around hands that were pressed tightly against the cave walls and ceilings. The oldest is at least 40,000 years old.

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Cave women in a different light

IT COULD be cave man pornography. Researchers have discovered illustrations of female anatomy in a rock shelter in France that date back 37,000 years. It is ''the oldest evidence of any kind of graphic imagery'', said Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University and one of the researchers working on the project.

He and his colleagues report their findings in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The drawings include what appear to be images of the female vulva, illustrated by circles with small slits on one side. ''You see this again and again and again,'' Professor White said. There are also very simple images, in profile, of animals, including horses and lion-like big cats, he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/cave-women-in-a-different-light-20120515-1yp30.html#ixzz1v8PLeU00

Caveman Art: Spotted Horses Likely Real, Not Fantasy

Ancient cave paintings that seemed to depict make-believe white-spotted horses might have been drawn from real life, scientists now find.

The cave paintings of the Stone Age are not only among the oldest drawings made by humans, but also serve as evidence of our growing capabilities. Scientists hotly debate how realistic these paintings are — discovering this fact could reveal whether ancient humans tended more toward accuracy or creativity.

The approximately 25,000-year-old paintings "The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle" depict spotted horses on the walls of a cave in France remarkably similar to a pattern known as "leopard" in modern horses such as Appaloosas. Horses were popular among Stone Age artists, found in most cave paintings that have recognizable animals in them, commonly in a caricature form that slightly exaggerates the most typical "horsey" features, such as their manes of hair.

Until now, ancient DNA analyses suggested horses during the Stone Age were only black or bay colored with no evidence for white-spotted patterns. This hinted that cave paintings of leopard-patterned horses were fantasy, not accurate portrayals. Some have proposed that drawings of imaginary animals might have had some kind of symbolic or even religious value.

Research now suggests those paintings might actually have been based on the real-life appearance of the animals.

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