“Indonesian Cave Paintings As Old As Europe’s Ancient Art”
“For decades, Indonesian researchers have known about rock art in limestone caves and rock shelters on an island called Sulawesi. The hand stencils and images of local animals, such as the “pig-deer,” or babirusa, were assumed to be less than 10,000 years old, because scientists thought that the humid tropical environment would have destroyed anything older.
“The truth of it was, no one had really tried to date it,” says Matt Tocheri of the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “It’s not easy to date rock art.””
I am wondering when assumptions about European art being the oldest were made, and thinking about the ways that something which seems intuitively true due to existing assumptions can go un-examined and become ‘true’ when it is believed for long enough by enough important people. If this assumption wasn’t so wide spread, would it have taken this long for someone to date the paintings?
It scares me to think about what assumptions I might hold about my science that go unexamined because someone made a biased assumption 100 years ago and it has become the basis of a wide set of logical assumptions.
