Was it 40,000 years or 4,000? The dating debate on that cave art finally hit me

I was reading the latest paper on the Sulawesi pig paintings, the ones they redated a few years back. The older claim was around 35k to 40k years, then the newer uranium series pushed it past 45k. But I also saw a counter paper arguing the calcite layers could be contaminated. So which number do we trust? The team's own supplements showed a 6% error margin that some say is too wide. I'm not a geochemist, I just dig potsherds mostly. But hitting that 45,500 number made me pause. Does a 5,000 year swing really matter for how we see early human behavior, or are we just chasing headlines? Anyone else get stuck on these dates that keep jumping around?

2 comments

2 Comments

stellachen18d ago

I used to just take whatever date the press release said and run with it, didn't really care about the margin of error. But that 6% swing on the Sulawesi stuff changed my mind completely. Like you said, it's not just a small tweak, it's thousands of years either way depending on which lab you trust and how they handled the calcite. What got me is that both sides can point to real data and still come out with different stories. So now I always check the supplements before I get excited about any big number, even for my own pottery stuff. The 5,000 year gap does matter for me though, because it changes whether we think symbolic thinking popped up all at once or spread out over a longer stretch. Does the exact year change anything you're working on, or is it more about the debate itself?

emery19918d ago

Wait, but when you looked at the supplements did you notice if they used the same pretreatment method on the pottery as they did on the rock art? Cause I've seen labs swap between acid leaching and wet oxidation depending on the sample, and that alone can shift things by a couple thousand years on carbonates. Are you checking for that or just the final calibrated range they bother to print? Cause the debate gets murky when people compare a date from one method against another method like they're apples to apples. And if symbolic thinking spread out over time, wouldn't the pottery record muddy that even more since ceramic traditions move slower than paint on a cave wall? Just wondering if you've got a system for spotting those hidden variables or if you're still trusting the abstract.