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There is nothing like a blank stone surface to inspire a widely shared urge to make art.
沒有什么東西會像空白的石頭表面一樣，能夠激發廣泛的藝術創作欲望。
A team of researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday that paintings of hands and animals in seven limestone caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi may be as old as the earliest European cave art.
周三（本文最初發表于2014年10月9日），一組科研人員在《自然》雜志(Nature)上發表文章稱，印度尼西亞蘇拉威西島七座石灰巖洞中發現的人手及動物圖像，可能與歐洲最早的洞穴畫一樣古老。
The oldest cave painting known until now is a 40,800-year-old red disk from El Castillo, in northern Spain.
目前已知的最古老的洞穴畫是西班牙北部卡斯蒂略金字塔中已有4萬零800年歷史的壁畫。
Other archaeologists of human origins said the new findings were spectacular and, in at least one sense, unexpected. Sulawesi’s cave art, first described in the 1950s, had previously been dismissed as no more than 10,000 years old.
其他一些研究人類起源的考古學家表示，這一新發現相當引人注目，而且至少在一種意義上，出乎了人們的意料。20世紀50年代，首次出現了有關蘇拉威西島洞穴畫的介紹。科研人員之前認為，這些壁畫的歷史不超過1萬年。
“Assuming that the dates are good,” Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in an email, “this is good news, and the only surprising thing is not that analogous finds would exist elsewhere, but rather that it has been so hard to find them” until now.
“假設得出的年代準確，”德國蒂賓根大學(University of Tübingen)的考古學家尼古拉斯·科納爾(Nicholas Conard)在電郵中說，“這是好消息，唯一令人意外的不是會在其他地方找到類似的發現，而是竟然一直都難以找到它們，”直到現在。
Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York, agreed that the discovery “certainly makes sense.” Recent genetic findings, he said, “support an early deployment of modern humans eastward to Southeast Asia and Australasia, and so having art of a similar age is reasonable as well.”
紐約城市大學萊曼學院(Lehman College of the City University of New York)的古人類學家埃里克·德爾森(Eric Delson)認同這項發現“無疑很合理”。他表示，最近在基因學上的發現“支持了晚期智人一早向東遷移至東南亞和澳大拉西亞的說法，因此擁有相似年代的美術作品也是合情合理的”。
The authors of the new study, a team from Australia and Indonesia, used a uranium decay technique to date the substance that encrusts the wall paintings — a mineral called calcite, created by water flowing through the limestone in the cave. The art beneath is presumably somewhat older than the crust.
這篇新研究論文的作者是一群來自澳大利亞和印度尼西亞的研究者。他們利用鈾衰變技術確定了壁畫外層物質的年代。這種名為方解石的礦物由水流過山洞里的石灰石而形成。礦物層下的壁畫的年代應該比礦物層本身更久遠。
Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, research fellows at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and the leaders of the study, examined 12 images of human hands and two figurative animal depictions at the cave sites.
澳大利亞昆士蘭格里菲斯大學(Griffith University)的兩名研究人員馬克西姆·奧貝特(Maxime Aubert)和亞當·布魯姆(Adam Brumm)是團隊帶頭人。他們對洞中12幅人類手部圖畫及兩幅具象動物圖畫進行了檢測。
The researchers said the earliest images, with a minimum age of 39,900 years, are the oldest known stenciled outlines of human hands in the world. Blowing or spraying pigment around a hand pressed against rock surfaces would become a common practice among cave artists down through the ages — and even some of the youngest schoolchildren to this day.
研究人員表示，其中最古老的圖畫至少有3萬9900年的歷史，是世界上已知的年代最久遠的利用人手模板繪制的輪廓圖。將手壓到巖石表面，在其周圍吹或噴灑顏料成為了后來的洞穴藝術家慣用的手法，甚至到了今天，一些年幼的學生還在使用這個方法。
A painting of an animal known as a pig deer, of the species babirusa, was determined to be at least 35,400 years old. The team concluded that it was “among the earliest dated figurative depiction worldwide, if not the earliest one.”
研究人員確定，一幅鹿豚——一種巴比如薩豬鹿——洞穴畫至少有3萬5400年的歷史。團隊認為，這“就算不是世界上最古老的具象圖畫，也屬于最古老的行列”。
The closest in age from Western Europe is a painting of a rhinoceros from Chauvet Cave in France, dated at 35,000 years old, although some archaeologists have questioned that estimate. The most familiar rock art in the region of Sulawesi was created by the Aborigines of Australia, modern humans who arrived there 50,000 years ago. But none of the surviving rock art is older than 30,000 years.
西歐地區與其年代上最接近的圖畫是法國肖維巖洞的犀牛圖。它有3萬5000年的歷史，但一些考古學家對這一估計表示懷疑。蘇拉威西島地區最為人所熟知的巖石藝術品是由澳大利亞的土著居民創作的。這些晚期智人在大約5萬年前到達該地區。不過，現存的巖石藝術品的歷史均未超過3萬年。
The Sulawesi dates challenge the long-held view about the origins of cave art in an explosion of human creativity centered on Western Europe about 40,000 years ago, Dr. Aubert said, in an announcement issued by Griffith University.
在格里菲斯大學發表的聲明中，奧貝特博士表示，蘇拉威西島畫作的年代對長期以來有關洞穴藝術起源的觀點形成挑戰。傳統觀念認為，人類創造力大爆發的現象以大約4萬年前的西歐地區為中心，并由此產生了洞穴藝術。
Instead, he said, the creative brilliance required to produce the lifelike portrayals of horses and other animals much later at famous sites like Chauvet and Lascaux in France could have particularly deep roots within the human lineage.
他表示，與這種學說相反，很久以后法國肖維巖洞和拉斯科洞穴等著名古跡里出現的那種栩栩如生的馬等動物的圖像，所需要的創意才華可能深深扎根于人類血統中。
But it is too soon to assess the discovery’s deeper implications, Wil Roebroeks, a specialist in human origins studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report. “Whether rock art was an integral part of the cultural repertoire of colonizing modern humans, from Western Europe to southeast and beyond, or whether such practices developed independently in various regions, is unknown,” he wrote.
荷蘭萊頓大學(Leiden University)研究人類起源的專家維爾·羅伯羅伊克茲(Wil Roebroeks)在與論文同時發表的評論中寫道，現在評估這項發現的深層含義還為時過早。“目前尚不清楚，巖石藝術究竟是從西歐遷移到東南部及更遠的地方的晚期智人創造的文化技能的內在組成部分，還是在各個地區得到了單獨發展，”他寫道。
“But what is clear,” Dr. Roebroeks continued, “is that no figurative art is known from before the time of the initial expansion of Homo sapiens into Asia and across Europe — neither from earlier H. sapiens in Africa nor from their contemporaries in western Eurasia, the Neanderthals.”
“但已經明確的是，”羅伯羅伊克茲博士繼續寫道，“還沒有發現智人最初向亞洲及在歐洲各地遷徙前出現的具象藝術，也沒有發現早期非洲智人或歐亞大陸西部同時代人類——尼安德特人——時期的具象藝術。”
Dr. Conard, of Tübingen University, said he had long argued for what he calls polycentric mosaic modernity, in which similar kinds of cultural innovations happened in different contexts as modern Homo sapiens spread across the world and displaced archaic hominins.
德國蒂賓根大學的科納爾博士表示，他早就提出了“多中心融合發展”的學說：隨著晚期智人擴散至世界各地，取代早期智人，不同的地方出現了類似的文化創新活動。
“I have never thought that complex symbolic behavior has a single point source and that cultural evolutions is like switching a light on,’” he said. “One would expect different regions to have distinctive signatures and to contribute to the story in their own way.”
“我從不認為，復雜的象征性行為有一個單一的源頭，也不認為文化進化就像關上燈的開關一樣，”他說。“應該認為不同的地區有各自的特征，以自己不同的方式共同為歷史貢獻力量。”
Dr. Delson, of CUNY, said he tended “to prefer the idea that art came as part of the ’baggage’ of Homo sapiens as they spread into Eurasia, mainly as we know that so many of the cultural features once thought to have developed in western Eurasia in fact occurred far earlier in Africa.”
紐約城市大學的德爾森博士則表示，他往往“傾向于這種想法，即藝術是智人擴散到歐亞大陸時攜帶的'行李'的一部分。這主要是因為，眾所周知，那些曾被認為起源于歐亞大陸西部的文化現象實際上很早以前就出現在非洲。”
He cited the examples of early use of pigments and engravings in Africa, as well as bodily adornment with shells and advanced stoneworking technology.
他提到的例子包括，非洲的人類早早使用顏料、進行雕刻、用貝殼裝飾身體，還擁有先進的砌石工藝。
In their report, Dr. Aubert and Dr. Brumm took no sides in the debate. “It is possible that rock art emerged independently around the same time and at roughly both ends of the spatial distribution of early modern humans,” they concluded. “An alternate scenario, however, is that cave painting was widely practiced by the first H. sapiens to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier.”
在論文中，奧貝特和布魯姆對這一爭論持中立態度。“巖石藝術有可能同時在早期智人分布地區的兩端獨立出現，”他們在結論部分這樣寫道。“然而，也可能是另一種情況，即再往前數萬年，第一批離開非洲的智人廣泛進行洞穴畫創作。”
If that is the case, the Australian-Indonesian research team predicted, “We can expect future discoveries of depictions of human hands, figurative art and other forms of image-making dating to the earliest period of the global dispersal of our species.”
如果事實的確如此，澳大利亞和印度尼西亞的聯合研究小組預測，“我們可以期待未來會發現人手圖畫、具象藝術，以及能夠追溯到人類最早向全球擴散時期的其他一些成像藝術形式。”
