Southern Cross University’s laser precision has dated the oldest known evidence of storytelling in art, found in a cave in Indonesia, at 51,200 years.
The painting of a hunting scene, located in the limestone cave of Leang Karampuang in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi, portrays three human-like figures interacting with a wild pig.
Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau, an expert in archaeogeochemistry in the Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry Research Group (GARG) at Southern Cross University, is a co-first author of the findings published today in the journal Nature doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7
To determine its age, Professor Joannes-Boyau developed a novel method of laser ablation U-series (LA-U-series) analysis, to date tiny layers of calcium carbonate that had formed on top of the art.
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