30,000-year-old Ice Age civilisation discovered in Indonesia

This piece of limestone is incised with three lines that overlap to form a simple crisscross pattern. It is a fragment of what was once a larger decorated rock, the remainder of which has not yet been found at the site. Scale bar: 10mm. Source: Mark W. Moore, author-provided.

A CAVE dig in Indonesia has unearthed a unique collection of prehistoric ornaments and artworks that date back, in some instances, to at least 30,000 years ago. The site is thought to have been used by some of the world’s earliest cave artists.
Published today, our findings challenge the long-held view that hunter-gatherer communities in the Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) of Southeast Asia were culturally impoverished.
They also imply the spiritual lives of humans transformed as they encountered previously unknown species on the journey from Asia to Australia.

The human journey beyond Asia
Modern humans had colonised Australia by 50,000 years ago. It was a journey that required people crossing by boat from continental Eurasia into Wallacea, a vast swathe of island chains and atolls spanning the ocean gap between mainland Asia and Australia.

 

Archaeologists have long speculated about the cultural lives of the first Homo sapiens to enter Wallacea, as part of the great movement of our species out of Africa.
Some have argued human culture in the Late Pleistocene attained a high level of complexity as Homo sapiens spread into Europe and as far east as India. Thereafter, culture is thought to have declined in sophistication as people ventured into the tropics of Southeast Asia and Wallacea.
But new research in Wallacea is steadily dismantling this view.
New findings from ‘Ice Age’ Sulawesi
In the latest addition to this rash of discoveries, we describe a suite of previously undocumented symbolic artefacts excavated from a limestone cavern on Sulawesi, the largest island in Wallacea.
The artefacts were dated using a range of methods to between 30,000 and 22,000 years ago. They include disc-shaped beads made from the tooth of a babirusa, a primitive pig found only on Sulawesi, and a “pendant” fashioned from the finger bone of a bear cuscus, a large possum-like creature also unique to Sulawesi.

Also recovered were stone tools inscribed with crosses, leaf-like motifs and other geometric patterns, the meaning of which is obscure.

Further evidence for symbolic culture was shown by the abundant traces of rock art production gleaned from the cave excavations. They include used ochre pieces, ochre stains on tools and a bone tube that may have been an “airbrush” for creating stencil art.