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The "New" Oldest Art In The World is 40,000 Years Old

Uranium-thorium dating reveals cave paintings in Indonesia predate the Chauvet cave murals by a few thousand years.

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Way before LED light paintings and GIFS, our oldest creators kept it simple, using cave walls as canvases, and their own two hands as stencils. According to research published online today in Nature, cave paintings found on walls in Sulawesi, Indonesia were discovered to be at least 40,000 years old, pre-dating the previously-held oldest art in the world by a few thousand years. While this finding nullifies previous hypotheses that human creativity most likely originated in Europe, the Chauvet caves captured so beautifully in Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" will always have a place in our hearts.

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“Our discovery on Sulawesi shows that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins, perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe,” explains lead archaeologist Maxime Aubert to The Guardian. This particular cave painting was discovered in the 1950s, but no one thought of using a newer uranium-thorium method to date the “popcorn”-like calcium carbonate on the mural's surface until now. At the time of their discovery, researchers had dated the 12 different hand stencils and animal paintings to be only around 10,000 years old.

It goes without saying: art history is being re-written as we speak. Below, check out the "new" oldest works of art on Earth:

h/t NatGeo

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3-D Cave Paintings, Courtesy of Werner Herzog