Cave Art Dates Contradict Human Nature

After painting a pig on a cave wall, what did these artists do for five times all of recorded history?

The news media are all claiming that the oldest cave art of animals has been found – not in Africa, not in Europe, but in Indonesia, on an island. In a hard-to-reach cave on Sulawesi, an island off the coast of Borneo that is about as large as Florida, archaeologists found paintings of wild goats, pigs and hand prints of the artists. The researchers claim some of the paintings are at least 40,000 years old (older than the famous Chauvet cave art which is said to be 30,000 to 33,000 years old). The oldest one, a “hairy, warty pig,” is claimed to be 45,500 years old. See Live Science for pictures of the art, and BBC News for a video clip inside the cave, and comments about the “emergence” of art, which evolutionists interpret as a sign of evolving intelligence. The narrator says,

Scientists will now have to rethink when, and crucially where, art first emerged – a key moment when our species became truly human.

Racist depiction of cavemen in a museum.

The study was published in Science Magazine, 13 Jan 2021. Brumm et al. say, “To our knowledge, the animal painting from Leang Tedongnge is the earliest known representational work of art in the world.” The dates were estimated from uranium-thorium dating of calcite crystals that had grown over the art. Live Science cautions:

However, the researchers had a number of technical difficulties with the uranium–thorium dating, which they acknowledge, but which make the dates rough estimates, said David Pearce, an associate professor at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, who was not involved with the research. “It is important to remember that they are relative ages … rather than direct dates on the paintings themselves,” Pearce told Live Science in an email.

The paper in Science lays out the dating scheme for human evolution, to indicate where this find fits in the story:

On the basis of the fossil evidence, it is now contended that our species had emerged in Africa by 300 ka [300,000 years]. Moreover, some archaeological and genomic data imply that H. sapiens was established in eastern Asia by 120 ka. AMH [anatomically modern humans] were also possibly in northernmost Sunda at around the same time. On the basis of the presently available evidence, we are unable to definitively conclude that the dated figurative rock art depiction from Leang Tedongnge is the handiwork of cognitively “modern” members of our species. However, this seems to be the most likely explanation given the sophistication of this early representational artwork and the fact that figurative depiction has so far only been attributed to AMH everywhere else in the world.

Well, the authors are certainly not going to say that the pigs made selfies on the wall. And so another discovery changes the evolving tale of human evolution, showing mental sophistication emerging “earlier than thought” by believers in evolution.

Examples of animal art in Chauvet Cave, France, rivaling Cezanne’s paintings.

The dates make no sense. Consider these facts in the reports:

• The same kind of pigs still live in the land near the cave.
• The new story contradicts the old “out of Africa” story, putting artists in the far east on an island tens of thousands of years before they were supposed to be there.
• If the dates are trusted, scientists would have to believe that many thousands of people lived near that cave for thousands of years, but only a few of them made paintings or hand prints.
• Art that is similar in quality to those in Europe are now claimed to have been made by anatomically modern humans (with modern minds) ten thousand years earlier on the other side of the world.
• The scientists think they will be able to find DNA and saliva on the cave walls. That material degrades rapidly.

What we have been told for decades about early man, therefore, is false. All that National Geographic fluff is now defunct. Evidence of mentally-astute, creative people can be seen on the walls of these caves across the world.

“It adds to the evidence that the first modern human cave art traditions did not arise in ice age Europe, as long assumed, but at an earlier point in the human journey,” says [Adam] Brumm.

The most absurd thing they say is that people with all the endowments we have just lived simple, primitive lives for tens of thousands of years without inventing anything. In far less time, human history shows people advancing from mud huts to the moon, from primitive fishing with bone hooks to building particle accelerators. They move around, crossing continents and bodies of water rapidly. That is what we know about human nature. How can anyone believe that people like us never got bored and thought about inventing technology?

“I was struck dumb,” says Brumm. “It’s one of the most spectacular and well-preserved figurative animal paintings known from the whole region and it just immediately blew me away.”

He was struck dumb, all right. He was found dumbfounded after he took Evolutionary Biology class, drank the Darwine and sacrificed his brain to the Bearded Buddha. The only reason that scientists believe these dates is because Charlie needs the time. An entire scheme has co-opted geology, biology, genetics, ecology, and natural history into a Grand Myth. The dates are fixed with “golden spikes” of their own imagination. Students are indoctrinated into the Grand Myth from the earliest ages, taught that the myth is “science” as opposed to “religion” and then they become hardened against independent thinking. So superior do they feel their myth is to “religion,” they are willing to think that their own intelligence was the result of mutations. A cosmic ray hits a hominid’s brain, and suddenly he wants to draw a pig on the wall. Wow! Science!

Breathes there any scientist who will look at the bullet points above and say, “You know, this is kind of dumb thinking that those hand prints and animal figures, just like the ones in Europe, were really made ten thousand years apart”? Will one of them please ponder the evidence outside the Darwin camp and follow it where it leads? Will someone realize that human beings with brains are restless and creative? They would never put up with the same ol’ – same ol’ cave cookout routine for a thousand years, let alone 40 thousand, When you get outside the Darwin theater with all its fogma and black light, enter the sunshine and turn around and look at the theater from outside, the Grand Myth looks really nutty.

It’s time for creationists to go on offense here. All the secular journals and science media outlets are in cahoots, believing absurd things. Sensible people really need to laugh harder.

Cartoon for CEH by Brett Miller. All rights reserved.