In Indonesia, humanity's oldest art is flaking away. Can scientists save it?
nature.com
nature.com
To preserve it a replica cave ended up being built for tourism, with the original being closed off except for scientific excursions
They did eventually open a huge replica cave which you can visit, the Caverne du Pont-d'Arc aka Chauvet 2.
Learning more about cavemen from paintings that have been studied for decades is not going to enable scientific discoveries that will advance humanity, it will not change anything to the present or the future of humanity. It literally serves no purpose other than to tell stories of a past so distant it does not hold lessons that are important for the future.
So what is left beside just the enjoyment of the public? What is the point of preserving those paintings by forbidding anyone from ever seeing them?
We have thousands of pictures of those paintings, gatekeeping their access to a handful of scientists is no different than letting them disappear entirely.
At some point the past has nothing to teach anymore.
Perhaps not the painting. Perhaps we develop a technique which can learn from the dust on the ground, or the sediments accumulated in the cave.
It is a very small cost to keep the cave closed. And in the history of humankind we have multiple times destroyed stuff later generations could have learned from.
Just look up for example the history of the Herculaneum papyri[1] and all the attempts to unroll them with destructive methods. Many of those were destroyed forever without being read or only partially read. And it very much seems like we are on the precipice of having the tech to read them non-destructively.[2]
And if all you want is to ogle at the paintings then you can do that in the replica cave?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri 2: https://scrollprize.org/
The book directly pulls on the kind of data on early societies that the scientists studying these caves produce.
Make good copies in enameled brass or bronze, inscribe some words about their context, and sell them as souvernirs or collector's items to people that are interested in these things.
I do believe the Indonesian cave painting have the distinction of being the oldest known art with distinct animal figures.
You might think so, but no, very few people understand this. People are constantly being shocked when a technology that is obviously highly developed in one archaeological period turns out to have precursors in earlier periods.
You might also compare the common claim that one human language is older or younger than another one. With a few obvious exceptions, this claim is gibberish, but that doesn't stop people from making the claim or believing that it means something. It's that tendency to believe things despite the fact that half a second of thought would be sufficient to disprove them that causes trouble here.
Why is this gibberish? Languages are pretty tied to time/place, and some are undoubtedly older than others?
You can say that Latin is younger than French. But you can't say that Sardinian is older than French or that Telugu is older than Hindi; those claims are incoherent.
Plus climate change general impacts
This is very well laid out and beautiful, but I generally don’t come to nature for that type of article. So while it was engaging to stay along with, it did take a while to get to the point.