Journal article
Ages for Australia's oldest rock paintings
Damien Finch, Andrew Gleadow, Janet Hergt, Pauline Heaney, Helen Green, Cecilia Myers, Peter Veth, Sam Harper, Sven Ouzman, Vladimir A Levchenko
Nature Human Behaviour | Nature Research | Published : 2021
Abstract
Naturalistic depictions of animals are a common subject for the world’s oldest dated rock art, including wild bovids in Indonesia and lions in France’s Chauvet Cave. The oldest known Australian Aboriginal figurative rock paintings also commonly depict naturalistic animals but, until now, quantitative dating was lacking. Here, we present 27 radiocarbon dates on mud wasp nests that constrain the ages of 16 motifs from this earliest known phase of rock painting in the Australian Kimberley region. These initial results suggest that paintings in this style proliferated between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago. Notably, one painting of a kangaroo is securely dated to between 17,500 and 17,100 years on ..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We acknowledge and thank the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, Rangers and Traditional Owners for permission to work on their Country and for their support during fieldwork. In particular, we thank A. Unghango and family, the Waina family and A. Chalarimeri. Fieldwork support was provided by S. Bradley, P. Hartley, N. Sundblom, R. Maher, T. Tan, M. Maier and P. Kendrick. The sites we visited were relocated and recorded over decades by Dunkeld Pastoral Co Pty Ltd and the Kimberley Visions Survey teams, J. Schmiechen and the late G. Walsh. Radiocarbon measurements and laboratory support from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) was provided by A. Williams, F. Bertuch and B. Yang. Financial support for the Centre for Accelerator Science at ANSTO was provided by the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. D.F. thanks AINSE Ltd for providing financial assistance through a Post Graduate Research Award to enable work on the radiocarbon analyses. This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Projects LP130100501 and LP170100155, with funding partners the Kimberley Foundation Australia (now Rock Art Australia), with in-kind support from Dunkeld Pastoral Co Pty Ltd, and Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation especially for fieldwork. D.F. is supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award. The Kimberley Foundation Australia also provided a grant to D.F. to establish the radiocarbon pretreatment facility at the University of Melbourne. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript beyond that indicated above.