[LINK] "Q&A: Cave Art Older, More Widespread Than Thought, Archaeologist Says"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic has a nice brief interview with Alistair Pike, a British archeologist who found ancient cave art in Indonesia. This matters.

How surprising is it to find such old cave paintings outside Europe?

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. The hand stencils are almost identical to ones seen in Europe and elsewhere around the world, which is really interesting.

We've been shown here that our views have been too "Eurocentric" about the origins of cave painting. It's not surprising that people for years thought that France and Spain was the home for this art. That's where it was found in caves. But now we have new evidence.

Before this find, what was the history of cave painting thought to be?

Well, one argument that was made largely because we had all these European cave paintings was that when modern humans migrated to Europe, they competed with Neanderthals for caves, which led to a cultural change.

Other forms of symbolism existed, but people just didn't need to paint caves outside of Europe.

What's clear now is that the phenomenon happened elsewhere.