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Maxime Aubert: Looking to the past to change history
Courtesy of Maxime AubertArt show: An undated handout photo from Nature Magazine shows some of the hand stencils in Indonesia that Maxime Aubert (above) researched, indicating that human ancestors were drawing all over the world 40,000 years ago
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Courtesy of Maxime Aubert
Archeologist Maxime Aubert has been traveling back and forth from Australia to Indonesia over the past two years for research and he is excited because in the next few years he will spend more time in the archipelago.
'I have secured three-year funding to do research in Southeast Asia. I want to do more work in Sulawesi. I have also explored possibilities in Kalimantan. My Indonesian colleagues have offered [me] work in Papua and other places,' Aubert told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.
The Canadian researcher is one of the leading experts involved in joint Indonesian-Australian research in measuring the age of prehistoric cave art in Maros, South Sulawesi.
Indonesian researchers involved in the study are, among others, Budi Hakim of the Makassar Institute of Archaeology, Muhammad Ramli of the Makassar Archaeological Heritage Preservation Institute, Thomas Sutikna and Wahyu Saptomo of the National Center for Archeology (Arkenas).
Aubert and his team made a groundbreaking finding in the study: that modern man may not have originated in Europe but instead in Southeast Asia as well as other places.
After dating 12 stenciled outlines of human hands and two drawings of babirusa (pig-deer) in seven prehistoric caves in Maros, the researchers found that the images were drawn at least 40,000 years ago.
The finding shatters the belief that western Europe was the center of early human artistic activity, such as cave paintings and other forms of image-making, as suggested by numerous findings in France and Spain, which include a painting of a red disk at El Castillo in Spain that is a least 41,000 years old.
'Now we can say that this Euro-centric view is not true, because we have found that around the same time humans were making cave paintings on Sulawesi Island,' said the researcher, who studied archeology and anthropology at Université Laval in Canada in 2000.
'We don't know if cave painting was invented at the same time in different places, but the paintings in Sulawesi could be much older than those in Europe because we know that modern humans were in Southeast Asia 50,000 years ago and only 40,000 years ago in Europe,' he said.
Aubert said that with the findings in Sulawesi, two theories had been put forward. The first hypothesizes that modern man evolved at different places and became fully modern in Southeast Asia and Europe at about the same time. The second one proposes that when modern man left Africa 50,000 years ago, he was already truly modern and made art in various places.
'It's only a matter of time before we find an older one in Indonesia as well as along the route of the modern human journey in Africa, India and China,' Aubert said.
The prehistoric handprints in Sulawesi, which were found in the 1950s, are well-known to Indonesians, as the prehistoric Leang-Leang Cave is mentioned in school textbooks.
But the prints were thought to be only 10,000 years old because of the erosion rate in the limestone caves in which they were found.
Aubert, who has a Master's degree in geochemistry and a PhD in uranium-isotopes geochemistry, was invited to one of the Maros caves by Adam Brumm and Thomas Sutikna, who were doing an archeological study at the site.
'With the technology that we have today, we can do really fine dating on archeological layers, like paint layers,' Aubert said.Aubert estimated the age of layers of calcium carbonate [known as 'cave popcorn'] that formed on the surface of the paintings. As they formed, the layers drew in uranium, and because uranium decays at a known rate, scientists can measure how old the cave popcorn is.
'I studied geochemistry because I want to use science to answer archeological questions. Dating is one of its uses. We are also trying to find out, for example, what the early humans ate and where they went,' he said.
Aubert said that as a child he was always interested in history and archeology and he enjoyed spending time looking at fossils and rocks. He also loves exploring and going on adventures.
At the age of 18, he climbed the 6,960-meter-high Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, one of the seven highest summits in the world. 'I really like exploring places; bushwalking, trailing, hiking. I love going to remote places, seeing things that many other people can't see,' said the researcher, who is currently based in Queensland, Australia.
Aubert said that archeology remained an exciting a field.
'There are lots of new sites and new ways of research,' he said. 'In Indonesia alone there is immense potential for new studies; researchers could work here for generations.'
