Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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Sure, the African-origin hypothesis is plausible—IMO it was the obvious answer all along. But taking the Indonesian art as “reinforcement” of that hypothesis requires a bit of a logical leap.
Consider the two traditional hypotheses:
Representational art originated in Africa with the ancestors of modern humans, and spread with their migrations; or
Representational art originated where we find the earliest examples of it, and spread from there via cultural diffusion.
Hypothesis 2 was considered plausible as long as the earliest examples were from Europe. Finding earlier art in Indonesia doesn’t inherently support hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2 unless you combine it with the assumption that cultural innovations spreading from Europe is more plausible than innovations spreading from Indonesia. But that assumption isn’t even addressed—it’s just silently taken for granted.
It's not a leap at all. If hypothesis 1 is correct then you'll find cave art all over the world because humans were making cave art before they left Africa. There's been debate over whether Neanderthals were making art as well, seems like they were imo, and they left Africa well before Sapiens did.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible. It was probably only considered plausible by people with hardly any archeological data who were stuck inside a white-supremacist worldview in 1940. The world has since made some progress disabusing itself of such ideas.
That’s my point: if 2 was never plausible in the first place, then changing the proposed origin from Europe to Indonesia doesn’t affect the likelihood one way or the other. Saying the Indonesian evidence supports the African hypothesis without explaining why is quietly letting the implied white supremacism off the hook without calling it out.
It's been called out for decades now. Explaining the situation every time a non-European site predates a European site of the same type would be beating a dead horse.
But without that explanation, the claim that the Indonesia site supports the Africa hypothesis isn’t true—and it actually reinforces the same Eurocentrism that motivates hypothesis 2.
On the face of it, the claim that representational art originated wherever we find the earliest evidence of it seems innocent enough. And if you really believe it innocently, the Indonesia site doesn’t affect your belief one way or the other. It’s only if you had an underlying Eurocentric motive for believing the earliest-evidence theory that the Indonesia site motivates you to switch to the alternative theory (which at least still credits the direct ancestors of Europeans with the invention of art). So saying the new site supports the Africa theory is taking for granted the Eurocentric worldview that would motivate that switch.