Scientists have confirmed that the painting of a kangaroo in a rocky sandstone shelter in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia is about 17,300 years old, making it the oldest known rock art in Australia.
The faded image, which is about two meters long, was dated using a radiocarbon technique that analyzed wasp nests that were beneath and above the ocher-based ink.
Augustine Unghango, a Balanggarra man and traditional owner of the area, climbed the escarpment above the Drysdale River and visited the painting several times.
“I was very excited when I found out how old he was. It is important that we do this, ”he said.
The research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, shows that the ocher kangaroo was completed when the Earth emerged from an ice age and the ocean was more than 100 meters lower than it is today.
The painting site is about 70 km from the coast, but at the time the northwest coast was painted, it was more than 200 km further away.
The study’s co-author, Dr. Sven Ouzman of the University of Western Australia, said that several Australian rock paintings were between 10,000 and 15,000 years old, but the discovery near the Drysdale River was the oldest still in its original place.
“At that time you were reaching the end of the last ice age and in Kimberley it seemed to have been very dry and things were difficult. Even so, people are painting, ”he said.
Evidence of older art was found in Australia, but it was fragments of rock or pieces of pigment.
Ouzman said that the person or people who painted the kangaroo “had to be connected to the trade network” at that time to obtain the materials.
Research published earlier this year found that the oldest cave painting in the world was a life-size 45,000-year-old representation of a pig on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Sulawesi’s painting is similar in style to the kangaroo and Ouzman said there may be a cultural connection between the two.
Unghango said that kangaroos are culturally important and young people follow them into the desert as part of an initiation.
The research was led by Dr. Damien Finch, a geochronologist at the University of Melbourne who developed the technique of using wasp nests to date rock art.
For the research, Finch and his colleagues examined 16 paintings in eight rock shelters in the same area and analyzed 27 mud wasp nests. Finch has visited the kangaroo painting site since 2015.
“You go under a slope and stay on the roof – it’s a little tight,” he said.
“You can’t see everything at once. It reveals itself slowly because there are so many [wasp] nests. It takes a while to put your eyes in and assimilate the pigment. “
The fossilized nests are mostly sand, but they also contain particles of coal that Finch said probably came from burnt spinifex grass.
By dating the coal in the nests – some under the painting and some above – the researchers were able to establish two dates between which the painting should have been completed.
Finch said the intention was not to find the oldest painting, but to accumulate dates for a period of rock art known as a naturalist, dominated by images of animals and occasionally plants.
Cas Bennetto, of the non-profit organization Rock Art Australia who helped fund the research, said the discovery was an “exciting story”, but “there will be more”.
She felt that further research could push Kimberley’s rock art age beyond 30,000 years.
“Our purpose is to understand the history of human habitation in Australia and we do this through rock art and its different contexts,” said Bennetto.
Future research will aim to set dates for the naturalist rock art style, which came before a style known as Gwion, which saw human figures become popular.