food for creative making, doing, and thinking
Photograph by Maxime Aubert, Griffith University, Australia
Source: nationalgeographic.com
A groundbreaking discovery was recently made in the field of archeology, in which cave paintings dating back at least 39,900 years were found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The content of the paintings includes outlines of hands and paintings of an animal known as a babirusa, or “pig-deer.” These paintings are considered to be among the oldest figure drawings in the world, opening the doors to a wide range of study oin the fields of evolutionary science, archaeology, and art history. Archaeologist Alistair Pike observes that “We’ve been shown here that our views have been too ‘Euro-centric’ about the origins of cave painting. […] Absolutely this changes our views, and is going to make us ask a lot of questions about the causes rather than the origins of cave art.” New ideas have now developed as to the universality of certain practices of art that can be observed from a historical as well as contemporary perspective. Pike claims that “making hand stencils seems a universal human practice” because hands are recurring images in caves around the world. Pike also points out how “Children love to make handprints, even today,” another clue pointing to the innate tendency for humans to focus on hands in the development of art.
To read more about this exciting discovery, visit the National Geographic website.