On March, 15 2015, My siblings and I visited Leang-Leang Village, in Maros, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. This UNESCO World Heritage site has been one of the top destinations in holiday list since months ago. It was due to the mystery it holds behind the veils of pre-history. As soon as I got the chance, I flew from Jakarta to visit my home town with intention to see the famous karst and the parietal-art with my own eyes.

We reached Leang-Leang after one of hour road-trip from Makassar. As I walked in that preserved area, the presence of post-ice-age impact on the Earth surface embodied in the karstic limestones that are standing high up above my head. By their sides, the cliff-shaped stones displayed a trace of under-water activity that caused erosion. Back in thousand years ago, rivers used to flow down the side of this landscape.

Having climbed to the Leang Pettakere,  the mountain-like karst where the famous cave located, I finally got to see the paintings myself. The paintings looked exactly the same as shown in TV programmes about archeology. The paintings were crafted with red-mulberry ink portraying multiple tiny palms and a pig-deer (extinct animal that used to inhabit areas in the Wallace Zone). Based on the radio-carbon investigation, the cave-art was made around 40.000 to 39.000 years ago.

There was a great satisfaction to witness the historical heritage. However, a bigger question surfaced in my mind. Who made it?

The Mystery of The Art Cave of Leang Pettakere

Parietal art is associated with prehistoric human civilisation or early modern humans. According to archaeologists and historians, such art could only be produced by living beings with sophisticated cognitive functions. Based on the radiocarbon dating and the method of painting, assumptions suggest that the art was an intellectual creation of Homo sapiens. However, here is the interesting part: the soil layers directly underneath contain ancient stone tools belonging to a mysterious earlier hominin, highly suspected to be Homo erectus or its direct descendants. That said, without the radiocarbon dating methods to assess the period when the art was made, we could mistake it for paintings made by Homo erectus. This assumption would be deemed irrelevant, however, when considering that there is no evidence suggesting that Homo erectus possessed any seafaring technology to cross the deep sea surrounding Sulawesi Island, which was never frozen even during the Ice Age.

The idea itself already made the historical site interesting!

Another line of research related to cave art indicates that similar paintings were found in northern Spain. Based on those findings, the art was made by the Neanderthals, a discovery that brought a new enlightenment to the interpretation of caves like Leang Pettakere. Why? it provided a compelling hypothesis to explain the small size of the hand stencils depicted in the picture. So, could it be related?

Unfortunately, no. It has been proven that Neanderthals went extinct around the time modern humans entered Europe 40,000 years ago, long before Homo sapiens migrated 13,000 miles away to South Sulawesi. Besides, researchers assumed that the paintings in both Spain and Indonesia developed independently.

To keep feeding my curiosity, I sought folklore stories to explain the origins of the paintings. The island’s indigenous people believed in the presence of shamans, archaic healers who retreated to caves to reach a trance state. It was told that when a shaman confined himself, this trance state would conjure projections of life and the world. These visions were then translated into the figurative drawings and abstract paintings we see in Leang Pettakere today. Yet, there is a glaring contradiction between folklore and history. According to historical accounts, the indigenous people of South Sulawesi, called the ‘To Ugi,’ arrived in the region from Yunnan around 1,500 to 500 BCE. They communally inhabited the area around Lake Tempe before spreading as the Buginese to other areas throughout the island. The tribe then developed into small, institutionalised chiefdoms before thriving into great kingdoms, where one of the kings was my direct ancestor. Hence, a massive chronological gap remains between the making of the art and the arrival of these historic inhabitants.

Eventually, I concluded that the cave art of Leang Pettakere indeed renders a prehistory treasure that should be preserved. The journey was a great success and as citizens who care about the national heritage, I urge for those who visit the place to help preserve the site. So that its wonders could live for another thousands of years.