A kangaroo painting created over 17,000 years ago by Aboriginal artists has been identified as the oldest intact rock art of Australia.
Key Points
- As per research, the six-feet-long (2 metre) artwork on the sloped ceiling of a rock shelter in Western Australia’s Kimberley region was painted in an early naturalistic style.
- This style often features life-sized renderings of animals.
- In to establish the age of original rock artworks, scientists worked with the local Aboriginal community, who can trace their heritage in the region back tens of thousands of years.
- The main challenge, globally, in dating ancient paintings, is that they very rarely employed a pigment that can be dated with any of the current, quantitative dating techniques.
- To get around this, the scientists identified a way to work out the age of the painting using ancient mud wasp nests.
- After this, they estimated that the kangaroo painting was between 17,500 and 17,100 years old, the oldest discovered to date.
- In total, the researchers dated 27 mud wasp nests around 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters and found that the artworks in this same naturalistic style were produced between around 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.
- The images were mostly depictions of animals, including a lizard-like figure, a snake, and three macropods marsupials including wallabies, kangaroos, and quokkas.
The research is a part of Australia’s largest rock art dating project. It was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
