Oldest directly dated cave art in Southeast Asia found in Cagayan town

via ABS-CBN News and other sources, 29 June 2021: Earlier this week I was part of the press conference for this recent paper by Jalandon et al. on the 3,500-year-old black rock art dates from the Philippines; the first directly dated rock art in Southeast Asia. The video to the press conference is below.

A handful of cave drawings — one of which is a little more than a stick figure barely 5 centimeters long with a wide rectangle of a body, its limbs outstretched as if in supplication — in Peñablanca town, Cagayan, have just been confirmed to be some 3,500 years old, making those the oldest directly dated rock art in Southeast Asia.

A variety of factors, including how and where an artwork was made, often makes it all but impossible to accurately ascertain its age. The famous Angono Petroglyphs, for example, were made by using a tool to scratch into the soft rock, so any attempt to directly date the figures would likely yield the age of the rock itself and not the age of the carvings.

However, an international team of researchers from the Philippines and Australia succeeded in directly dating the Peñablanca Pictograms— discovered in the 1970s — through a careful chemical analysis of a very small sample of the black pigment used to make the drawings.

Source: Oldest directly dated cave art in Southeast Asia found in Cagayan town | ABS-CBN News