In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#2Oldest art that we know of. I bet a lot of other art from that era and before has already been destroyed. We should just count it lucky that we've found and documented any of these things.
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#3ArtSavers Indonesia, coming soon to Discovery!
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#4Oldest art that we know of. I bet a lot of other art from that era and before has already been destroyed. We should just count it lucky that we've found and documented any of these things.
Good point. Once this one is gone, another oldest art will take it's place.
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#5The page looks amazing on mobile!
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#6Reminds me of the Chauvet Cave in France, which also holds cave-painting, where the large number of visitors changed the atmosphere of the cave, causing mold and damaging the paintings.
To preserve it a replica cave ended up being built for tourism, with the original being closed off except for scientific excursions
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#7Oldest art that we know of. I bet a lot of other art from that era and before has already been destroyed. We should just count it lucky that we've found and documented any of these things.
It's only the oldest for purposes of simplifying pedagogy in scientific education. In reality the error bars on half a dozen of the "oldest" cave art in the world overlap so much that it's impossible to really conclude which one was older. There are even older works of art but they're more like patterns and abstract scribbles than what we would consider drawings.
I do believe the Indonesian cave painting have the distinction of being the oldest known art with distinct animal figures.
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#8Reminds me of the Chauvet Cave in France, which also holds cave-painting, where the large number of visitors changed the atmosphere of the cave, causing mold and damaging the paintings. To preserve it a replica cave ended up being built for tourism, with the original being closed off except for scientific excursions
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#9Reminds me of the Chauvet Cave in France, which also holds cave-painting, where the large number of visitors changed the atmosphere of the cave, causing mold and damaging the paintings. To preserve it a replica cave ended up being built for tourism, with the original being closed off except for scientific excursions
You're thinking of Lascaux I believe.
Re: In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
#10Reminds me of the Chauvet Cave in France, which also holds cave-painting, where the large number of visitors changed the atmosphere of the cave, causing mold and damaging the paintings. To preserve it a replica cave ended up being built for tourism, with the original being closed off except for scientific excursions
You're thinking of Lascaux I believe.
Kinda, the damage never happened to Chauvet because the preservators learned from Lascaux and Altamira: they did not open Chauvet to the public at all.
They did eventually open a huge replica cave which you can visit, the Caverne du Pont-d'Arc aka Chauvet 2.