“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.
I think they're drawing from the out-of-Africa hypothesis. If there is cave art in Indonesia and Europe, then it's plausible that the ancestors of both populations, which were in Africa, were also making cave art.
Sure, the African-origin hypothesis is plausible—IMO it was the obvious answer all along. But taking the Indonesian art as “reinforcement” of that hypothesis requires a bit of a logical leap.
Consider the two traditional hypotheses:
Representational art originated in Africa with the ancestors of modern humans, and spread with their migrations; or
Representational art originated where we find the earliest examples of it, and spread from there via cultural diffusion.
Hypothesis 2 was considered plausible as long as the earliest examples were from Europe. Finding earlier art in Indonesia doesn’t inherently support hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2 unless you combine it with the assumption that cultural innovations spreading from Europe is more plausible than innovations spreading from Indonesia. But that assumption isn’t even addressed—it’s just silently taken for granted.
It's not a leap at all. If hypothesis 1 is correct then you'll find cave art all over the world because humans were making cave art before they left Africa. There's been debate over whether Neanderthals were making art as well, seems like they were imo, and they left Africa well before Sapiens did.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible. It was probably only considered plausible by people with hardly any archeological data who were stuck inside a white-supremacist worldview in 1940. The world has since made some progress disabusing itself of such ideas.
That’s my point: if 2 was never plausible in the first place, then changing the proposed origin from Europe to Indonesia doesn’t affect the likelihood one way or the other. Saying the Indonesian evidence supports the African hypothesis without explaining why is quietly letting the implied white supremacism off the hook without calling it out.
It's been called out for decades now. Explaining the situation every time a non-European site predates a European site of the same type would be beating a dead horse.
But without that explanation, the claim that the Indonesia site supports the Africa hypothesis isn’t true—and it actually reinforces the same Eurocentrism that motivates hypothesis 2.
On the face of it, the claim that representational art originated wherever we find the earliest evidence of it seems innocent enough. And if you really believe it innocently, the Indonesia site doesn’t affect your belief one way or the other. It’s only if you had an underlying Eurocentric motive for believing the earliest-evidence theory that the Indonesia site motivates you to switch to the alternative theory (which at least still credits the direct ancestors of Europeans with the invention of art). So saying the new site supports the Africa theory is taking for granted the Eurocentric worldview that would motivate that switch.
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