When did we start making art?

Scientists found a set of five prints — human hands and feet — in limestone on the Tibetan Plateau. The prints are 169,000 to 226,000 years old — far older than the cave paintings in Indonesia, Spain and France, the oldest of which might be 45,000 years old.

Did humans or their close kin start making art much earlier than we previously thought?

Apparently so. Eighteen authors led by David D. Zhang published “Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet” in the Sept. 10 issue of Science Bulletin. (I heard about it from a friend who sent a link to “Hand and footprint art dates to the mid Ice Age” in the Sept. 14 edition of Science Daily.)

The prints are so old we don’t know the species of the artists. Were they homo sapiens, Denisovans or another extinct species?

What I love about this story is that a philosophical question — What is art? — comes into the play as a scientific question. We all agree that the marvelous cave paintings are art. What about a set of patterned handprints and footprints? The scientific question hinges on your concept of art.

One of the co-authors, Tommy Urban, a researcher at Cornell, was called in to consult when that old question came up. Urban has been studying footprints at White Sands, N.M., as a way of studying early humans.

Urban pointed out that the prints are not accidental — or accidentally placed. Two hominins made them, rather than left them.

Also, there was no utilitarian reason for making them. The artists weren’t trying to do something practical. It was a creative activity, something we think of as distinctly human. 

As it stands, the world’s oldest art was made by a couple of kids. The footprints were made by a child of about 7, while the handprints were made by a child of 12.