Cave Art in Borneo Leads to Belief : GREAT LEAP FORWARD Was Divine

Deep within a cave, deep within the jungle of Borneo, Indonesia, scientists have dated a cave painting; it is 40,000 years old. The painting is figurative art; it is the oldest discovered figurative art in the world. Its discovery adds to the mystery of THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD.

Its discovery adds weight to the belief that the mystery of the Great Leap Forward can only be solved by a scientific acknowledgement of a Creator.

“On the wall of a cave deep in the jungles of Borneo, there is an image of a thick-bodied, spindly-legged animal, drawn in reddish ocher.

It may be a crude image. But it also is more than 40,000 years old, scientists reported on Wednesday, making it the oldest figurative art in the world.

Until now, the oldest known human-made figures were ivory sculptures found in Germany. Scientists have estimated that those figurines — of horses, birds and people — were at most 40,000 years old.

Researchers have found older man-made images, but these were abstract patterns. The switch to figurative art represented an important shift in how people thought about the world around them — and possibly themselves.

The finding also demonstrates that ancient humans somehow made the creative transition at roughly the same time, in places thousands of miles apart.

“It’s essentially happening at the same time at the opposite ends of the world,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and a co-author of the report, published in the journal Nature.

Archaeologists have been discovering cave paintings and ancient sculptures for centuries, but it was only in the mid twentieth century that it became possible to precisely determine their age.

Traces of radioactive carbon are present in some types of art, and scientists gauge their age by measuring how long the carbon has been breaking down.

…. older art came to light. Another French cave, called Chauvet, is decorated with drawings of animals that researchers estimate date back as far as 37,000 years.

In 2003, Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany discovered the ivory figurines, which turned out to be far older: up to 40,000 years old.

….….The earliest art in the caves, the researchers found, were reddish-orange hand outlines and drawings of animals. The oldest of all was covered by a flowstone that formed 40,000 years ago.

That drawing depicts a four-legged animal that Dr. Aubert suspected was a species of wild cattle called a banteng.

Since the 40,000-year-old flowstone covers the banteng image, the artwork must be older than that — and thus the oldest known figurative art on the planet.

It’s hard to say when people first began to make these cave drawings, but one intriguing clue comes from a hand stencil. A flowstone atop it is 23,600 years old, while another underneath is 51,800 years old.

Combining the evidence from this stencil and the banteng image, it’s possible that people started making art in the Borneo caves sometime between 52,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago.

The new discovery indicates that people in Borneo were already making figurative images at the same time as people in Europe — or perhaps even thousands of years beforehand.

…. Dr. Aubert and other researchers are puzzling over what triggered these bursts of creativity.

….One thing is clear: Figurative art came late in the history of our species.

The oldest fossils of Homo sapiens, found in Morocco, are 300,000 years old. ….NEW YORK TIMES.”

The key, seminal importance of this cave art is confirmation that something happened to Mankind roughly fifty thousand years ago, which separated Mankind from his primitive ape like ancestors.

“The finding also demonstrates that ancient humans somehow made the creative transition at roughly the same time, in places thousands of miles apart.

“It’s essentially happening at the same time at the opposite ends of the world…”

That creative transition from ape like thinking to Human thinking was not caused by a mutation in one gene, nor was it a sport of nature, because it happened to all of Mankind, all over the world,at almost the same time, simultaneously.

Scientists call this creative transition, THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD.

"Behavioral modernity refers to the set of traits that distinguish present day humans, from both living primates and dead hominids; it is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a reliance on symbolic thought and to express cultural creativity. 

These developments are often thought to be associated with the origin of language. Behavioral Modernity occurred as a sudden event 50,000 years ago, or as a result of biological reorganization of the brain that led to the emergence of modern human natural languages. This event is called THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD."

Scientists cannot explain the GREAT LEAP FORWARD; Darwinists CERTAINLY cannot explain the GREAT LEAP FORWARD. The difference between Man and his primate cousins is not lineal Darwinism; it is not even progressive Darwinism. The difference between man and everything that went before is cosmological. The GREAT LEAP FORWARD is a paradigm shift in primates that Darwinists  can not explain.

“…About 50,000 years ago, something dramatic occurs, something happened, the modern mind emerged, triggering a creative, technological,and social explosion.”

This Blogger is a Believer, and will remain so for as long as Scientists cannot explain the Great Leap Forward, or the Big Bang to his satisfaction.

The whole purpose of Astrophyistcs is to get Mankind as close as possible to the Origin of the Universe, the Big Bang.

This Blogger believes that same paradigm can be used on the Great Leap Forward; let us try and get as close as possible to the Great Leap Forward to ascertain what it really was.

That leads us to Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey; it is an ancient ruin, a spectacular ruin.

“The structures are round megalithic buildings. The walls are made of unworked dry stone and include numerous T-shaped monolithic pillars of limestone that are up to 3 meters (10 ft) high. Another, bigger pair of pillars is placed in the centre of the structures. There is evidence that the structures were roofed; the central pair of pillars may have supported the roof. The floors are made of terrazzo (burnt lime), and there is a low bench running along the whole of the exterior wall."

Stonehenge is 7,012 years old(5,000BC).

The Pyramids are 4,600 years old(2,589 BC).

Easter Island Moai are 812 years old ( 1200 AD).

Gobekli Tepe is older than all those.

How old is it?

Gobekli Tepe is 12,000 years old, almost twice as old as Stonehenge, almost three times as old as the Pyramids.

Göbekli Tepe  was built to worship a Deity.

Worship is not a by-product of Civilization; Civilization  was created to worship

“…. these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. …. it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. … the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later,” says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, …”

The need to build a place to worship triggered farming, triggered civilization itself. There are no civilizations of atheists, and by definition, there can never be civilizations of atheists

Modern physics seems to be on its way to proving that Mankind is alone in the Universe as an intelligible entity ( see GRBs).Mankind may be it, not only the game in town, but the only game in the Universe capable of self-awareness, spirituality, Science  and Civilization.

And if Mankind is it, that makes the Great Leap Forward, VERY SPECIAL, DIVINE.

Every discovery of ancient figurative art  leads to the confirmation that the mystery of the Great Leap Forward is Divine. What  astrophysics is proving is this- that the Universe which exists even though it should not exist, has too many consistencies (mathematical principles applicable throughout the Universe) abiding with too many anomalies ( Galaxies without Dark Matter, ENTANGLEMENT) not to have been created by a Creative Divinity.

People of Faith don’t despair; soon there will no longer be a need for Miracles as confirmation of the existence of God; the only thing People  of Faith have to do is finance  Cave Discoveries and Astrophysics; let Science  do its thing. The proof that God exists will be found by Science.

"INDONESIA (Deutsche Welle) – Australian and Indonesian researchers have found the world’s oldest-known cave paintings on the island of Borneo. The art was painted at least 40,000 years ago, debunking the view that cave art solely existed in Europe.

Researchers have found the oldest known example of an animal painting, a red depiction of a bull on the wall of a cave in Indonesia.

In an article published by the journal Nature late Wednesday, uranium-series analysis of calcium carbonate deposits showed that animal sketches inside a Borneo limestone cave were painted at least 40,000 years ago.

That find showed that figurative art developed “most or less” simultaneously in Asia and in Europe, including in famed caves in Spain, Italy and France, said Maxime Aubert, an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia.

……. “It now seems that two early cave art provinces arose at a similar time in remote corners of Paleolithic Eurasia: one in Europe and one in Indonesia,” said Adam Brumm, another Griffith archaeologist involved in the study.

Samples from the Borneo site in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan region also dated two red-orange hand stencils at 37,200 years old, and a third possibly as old as 52,000 years, study authors said.

The team identified two phases: presumed wild cattle paintings and the hand stencils..." 
The 40,000 year old plus Cave Art in Borneo