Padah-Lin

Why this is extraordinary

Two caves face south near Ywangan, about 200 yards apart. The western one is a deep limestone system, on the order of 800 feet of linked caverns, dark except where holes in the roof let the day in. The eastern one, Cave 1, is a rock shelter, 30 to 40 feet deep, open to the light. In 1969 a dig in that shelter found stone tools, bone, charcoal, and pieces of red ochre. More than 1,600 stone artefacts came out of the work that followed, choppers and flakes and a few partly ground tools, including a crude shouldered adze and ring-stones. The photograph is a different marking on the same shelter’s rock: cupules, small pits hammered into the wall. Later recording put more than 300 cupules in Cave 1. They are not the paintings.

The paintings are on the middle of a wall that juts into the shelter, above ordinary reach, in red ochre. About a dozen figures are still distinct. Two at the west are human hands, one with concentric circles in the palm and one that looks like a skull. On a smooth part of the ceiling is a sun between two irregular lines that converge. The rest are animals: bulls, each with a calf at the heels, bison, a deer, the hindquarters of elephants, and a large fish. The excavation report reads the ceiling sun as the view from inside the shelter, the sun appearing between the brow of the cave and a distant ridge. That is a picture of a sight, not a measured azimuth. The shelter faces south. The report does not print a degree for the painted sun or for the mouth. How you would check the reading is to stand under the ceiling and look out, and see whether those two lines match the brow and the ridge. The report says they do. It does not give the angle.

The date splits. The report called the culture early Neolithic, a transition from flaked tools to grinding, comparable to the Hoabinhian and Bacsonian of mainland Southeast Asia, and it treated the paintings as the same age because ground ochre and unground lumps lay with the tools. Calcium on some figures was used as a sign that the paint is not modern: the drip is slow, and the report guessed it had taken at least a century, which is a floor, not a Pleistocene age. Radiocarbon on charcoal and bone from the shelter then showed occupation from the late Pleistocene, with results between about 1,750 and about 13,000 years before present, and a maximum near 13,400 has also been cited. A terminal date near 6,500 before present has been offered for the Hoabinhian-like industry. Later comment says the tools sit more comfortably with the late Pleistocene than with a Neolithic label. The paint has never been dated on the pigment. The ochre in the soil is the bridge. A bridge can be the painter’s palette and it can be colour from a later visit in a cave people used into recent times.

The deep western cave is not this argument. A later dig there, and at another cave nearby, has been reported with older deposits. Those holes do not date the red wall in the shelter. The Pyu cities are a different millennium and a different kind of brick. No second sky reading, beyond the ceiling sun as a view from the mouth, is published in the sources used here.