A kangaroo painting created over 17,000 years ago by Aboriginal artists has been identified with a little help from some ancient wasps as Australia’s oldest intact rock art. The Kangaroo is painted in red ochre. This indicates that the earliest style of rock art in Australia focused on animals, which is very similar to the cave art found in Indonesia and Europe.
A team of Australian scientist found the painting on the ceiling of a sandstone rock shelter in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. There are many rock art sites found all over Australia, with the Kimberley region of Western Australia containing a particularly rich record.
The scientists were able to determine the dates based on radiocarbon dated mud wasps’ nests that lay both over and under the painting. This technique has been used to assign dates to figurative rock art paintings in Spain, Indonesia, and Australia. Australian rock art has been categorized into five different phases, with the oldest thought to be the so-called naturalistic phase depicting mainly animals and sometimes plants such as yams. But with no firm dates, no one knew for sure.
The site is full of paintings and and there’s reason to believe that experts could identify paintings that are even older , since “wasps have been building nests at this site pretty much consistently for 20,000 years,” Damien Finch, who developed the technique by which wasp nests are used to date rock art, said.
The kangaroo is unlikely to be Australia’s oldest painting. Humans may have reached Australia as early as 65,000 years ago and the researchers have studied a tiny number of images in the rock art. “We have only worked on a fraction of the Kimberly. The chances are we haven’t found the oldest painting”, says Finch.