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I’m Wired to Write. You are too.
For 44,000 years, “I am here”
Every time archaeologists push back the date of the first known cave art, I swear my DNA whispers to me, “See, you’ve been a writer for a very, very, long time.” Last fall, Smithsonian Magazine and Nature.com published details about the discovery of cave art — depicting pigs, dwarf buffaloes, and hand stencils, along with what appear to be interpretations of “humanoids” — in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and estimated the artwork to be 44,000 years old.
As quoted in the Smithsonian story, Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, tells Michael Price at Science, “This is the oldest rock art in the world and all of the key aspects of modern cognition are there…When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find … their trash,” he says. “But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish. It seems like a message. We can feel a connection to it.”
The Sulawesi cave paintings, like those of similar or younger age found in Spain and France and in other sites around the world, are, to me, affirming messages of “self” — the “I am here” shout — that continues to reverberate…
