The Oldest? 17,300-Year-Old Kangaroo Painting Discovered in Australia

A life size red ochre  kangaroo painting has been discovered in  Australia. The ancient artwork has been dated to around 17,300 years old and the researchers are calling it “the oldest dated painted figure in an Australian rock shelter.” What can it tell us about the ancient history of Australia?

The Oldest Roo In Oz: Kangaroo Painting Discovery

The Kimberley region of Western  Australia is sparsely settled and known for large swaths of rugged mountain ranges and deep gorges. Set amidst a semi-arid savanna and greatly isolated coastline, the region contains thousands of rock paintings similar to the one that features in this article. Dating such images has always been a problem for researchers. But now, professor Damien Finch from the  University of Melbourne  has dated a series of ancient paintings in eight rock shelters in Balanggarra Country, which lies in the north-eastern Kimberley region.

Finch and his colleagues worked in conjunction with the  Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation , which represents the traditional owners of the land. Rock cannot be dated because it is not organic, but what did contain ancient data was “the radiocarbon signal from ancient wasp nests that lie beneath and on top of the artwork.” The  kangaroo was discovered painted on a rock behind the nests, that when dated are said to have been created some where between “17,500 and 17,100 years ago.”

Lower part of the 17,300-year-old kangaroo painting on the sloping ceiling of the rock shelter. (Damien Finch /  Nature)

Kangaroo Paintings from the Lost World

Cissy Gore-Birch, Chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, said that this rock painting “is the oldest known painting in an Australian  rock shelter .” The painted kangaroo is about 2 meters (6.56 ft) in length and it was one of 15 other images that were analyzed during the recent project. According to an article in the  New Scientist , the team of researchers also measured a 3-meter-long (3.28 ft) snake, “and a lizard-like creature,” as well as other kangaroo-like animals. It was concluded that this “naturalistic style” of animal paintings proliferated in this region for Australia between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.

While this kangaroo painting represents Australia s oldest rock painting inside a shelter, or cave, humans arrived around 65,000 years ago so it’s far from the  first art works  ever discovered in Australia. In 2009  Antiquity published an article about the discovery of  rock art , including engravings, or carvings, depicting now extinct megafauna such as  Genyornis and Thylacoleo from the Pleistocene era.

Rare depiction of a human figure from the oldest style of painting in the Kimberley. The inset shows the figure which has a wasp nest over the fingers at the top left. From the age of the wasp nest we know this painting is more than 9,000 years old. (Pauline Heaney and Damien Finch /  Nature)

The Ancient World of Animal Art

While the discovery of the 17,300-year-old kangaroo painting is indeed a remarkable find, it falls way short of the impact of Jeff During’s 2000 work:  Gwion Gwion: Secret and Sacred Pathways of the Ngarinyin Aboriginal People of Australia . This research presents what is “the oldest firmly dated rock art painting in Australia.” This unique charcoal drawing was discovered on a rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory in the 1990s which was dated “at 28,000 years old.” This location is described as “one of the oldest known pieces of  rock art  on Earth with a confirmed date”.

The 17,300-year old kangaroo painting is far from being Australia s oldest known  rock art , but what it does do is further illustrate the emerging picture of life in Australia during the Paleolithic. Cave art has been discovered in caves in Spain dated to 65,000 years ago, and according to  National Geographic  this “includes the oldest cave art ever found” that predates the arrival of modern  Homo sapiens  to Europe, which means someone else must have created them. And that someone else were the  Neanderthals, who were  painting in caves around the same time we  Homo sapiens  were arriving on the shores of Oz.

The full article is available from  Nature, DOI:  10.1038/s41562-020-01041-0

Top image: Traditional owner, Ian Waina, recording the 17,300-year-old kangaroo painting. Source: Peter Veth /  Balanggarra Aboriginal

By Ashley Cowie

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