Wild Pig Painting on a Cave in the Maros-Pangkep Karst; I Have Never Been This Excited to Talk About My Ancestors
Just like Instagram, Twitter has a feature where the users can follow topics they’re like. I have initially followed some topics like history and fairy tales related stuff but then they recommended me archaeology related stuff soon after. So I follow that topic because it reminds me of the sweet younger version of me when I was still can’t decide between choosing to be an architect or to be an archaeologist.
But last evening when I came home and scrolled the timeline, I found somebody tweeted about a piece of news in The Guardian which talked about a super interesting topic. So I clicked the link and read the whole article. And I was like, “Wow.” I don’t even know how to express it with words but shortly it makes me super excited. Probably it similar to the feeling when you found a good playlist on Spotify but this is more exciting — at least, for me.
The headline is “World’s Oldest Known Cave Painting Found in Indonesia”.
“Gua Leang-Leang” must be familiar to most Indonesian students because since our primary school we already told about that in national history classes, the cave where the oldest pre-historic cave painting was found. But then there are some cave paintings in the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe which are more than 44,000 years old.
But then in 2017, some archaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest known cave painting: a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,000 years ago in Indonesia. Then I read and read and try to know the blind spot I didn’t notice before about those cave paintings in my own country. But I still not feeling that was enough. I crave to know deeper about this.
And then there’s something in the article I mentioned before that tickled a place in my brain. They said:
Aubert, a dating specialist, identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, then used uranium-series isotope dating to confidently say the deposit was 45,500 years old.
This makes the painting at least that age, “but it could be much older because the dating that we’re using only dates the calcite on top of it”, he explained.
“The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked,” he added.
-Agence France-Presse (January 13rd, 2021)
It reminds me of something I found in Bernard H.M. Vlekke’s book “Nusantara, Sejarah Indonesia” or “Nusantara: A History of Indonesia”. He said,
“There is one of the popular historical myths that the tendency of civilization is always progressive, never retrogressive. We will see that in Indonesia there is historical evidence that proves this myth is wrong.”
Shortly it means that my ancestors aren’t an uncultured barbarian. This statement supported too by another paragraph like,
“When Indians first settled in the Indonesian Archipelago, they did not encounter any uncultured people, whom they could easily force-feed with their own culture.”
And another paragraph like this,
“Indonesians may also have played an active role and sailed to India on their own initiative. These people, who at that time or later sailed to distant Madagascar and who have remained known as skillful sailors throughout their history, must have had no great difficulty sailing their ships from Sumatra to Bengal or the Coromandel coast.”
I write this article as a starting point marker of my curiosity about my ancestors more deeply so that I can find out, what my ancestors really were like. So that in the future, my child will not recognize their ancestors as a generation of ignorant, barbarian, uncultured people, who were fooled by the colonials without ever having a rich cultural track record.
