Where's My Cow?

In Indonesia, and it has been for tens of thousands of years. Welcome to this week's Illumination! And yes, those of us in the US have a lot going on after yesterday's election, with a ton of firsts and a whole lot of work ahead, but you can get news about that pretty much everywhere.

Here? Here, we're going to talk about cave paintings. Archaeologists in Indonesia have finally been able to put a date to some figurative cave paintings found there, and discovered that it may be the oldest yet discovered at 40,000 years.

By "figurative," experts mean art that intends to represent something - in this case, a cow with horns. There is geometric artwork that dates older than this painting, but it isn't representative of a specific thing or person the way we would recognize it today.

The best part, to me, is finding that the style of drawing is something familiar across multiple continents. At some point, everyone's ancestors decided to try their hand at drawing what they saw, and decorating the space in which they lived. It says something about what it means to be human, I think.