I imagine (heh) representative art is much older, but most of it got destroyed (rotting), but it's also important to remember that this is getting close to where there were less humans than students in my city's smallest university, so... idk what to make of that. Representative art strikes me as something that would be invented many times
“This find reinforces the idea that representational art was first produced in Africa, before 50,000 years ago, and the concept spread as our species spread.
Representational art arising first in Africa seems plausible, but how does finding art a quarter of the way around the world reinforce that location specifically?
I’m sure the thinking is that art appearing in both Europe and Indonesia suggests that they both inherited it from their common ancestors in Africa.
But when the earliest art was thought to have been European, the idea that art originated in Europe and spread from there via cultural diffusion was considered a reasonable hypothesis. Now that earlier art has been found outside Europe, the flip scenario—that art spread from Indonesia to Europe via cultural diffusion instead of shared ancestry—isn’t even mentioned.