20 May 2021 Sulawesi

Sulawesi

Context

Pleistocene-era rock paintings dating back to 45,000-20,000 years ago in cave sites in southern Sulawesi, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, are a concern

Details

• The artwork in the area includes world’s oldest hand stencil (almost 40,000 years ago), created by pressing the hand on a cave wall, and spraying wet red-mulberry pigments over it.
• A nearby cave features the world’s oldest depiction of an animal, a warty pig painted on the wall 45,500 years ago.
• The cave art of Sulawesi is much older than the prehistoric cave art of Europe.

Reasons:

• The artwork made with pigments was decaying due to a process known as haloclasty, which is triggered by the growth of salt crystals due to repeated changes in temperature and humidity, caused by alternating wet and dry weather in the region.

Sulawesi

It is one of the four Greater Sunda Islands. It is governed by Indonesia. The world’s eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Within Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger populations.