These Millennia-Old Cave Paintings May Be Among India's Oldest

Locals have known about the artworks for generations, but government archaeologists only began documenting them this summer



The cave paintings are located in the Aravalli mountain range in northwestern India. (Tushar Dayal via Flickr under CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Livia Gershon

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JULY 30, 2021

Archaeologists say cave paintings found in northwestern India’s Aravalli mountain range may have been made more than 20,000 years ago. As Shubhangi Misra reports for the Print, the area where the art is located, in the state of Haryana, is also home to much older tools and tool-making equipment dated to as long as 100,000 years ago.

Banani Bhattacharya, deputy director of the Haryana Department of Archaeology and Museums, tells the Print that experts have found at least 28 ancient sites in Haryana to date. Some trace their roots to the time of the Harappan—or Indus Valley—civilization, which began around 2500 B.C.E., while others are much older. Drawing on the long history of settlement in the area, archaeologists have been able to trace both the development of tool-making and the emergence of art.

“Some are line drawings, which are the oldest, when humans hadn’t really figured out how to draw complex patterns,” Bhattaharya says. “Then we can see drawings of different geometric shapes, foliage, animals and human figures. We’ve found some symbols that look like cup marks, which had presumably been kept for some special purpose.”

Materials used to make the art changed over time, with most completed in ocher but other, more recent ones, rendered in white.

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