Landscapes, people, animals and other objects are depicted in the rock art drawings at Shuangtaizi Hill in China. The oldest ones are thought to be 3,300 years old.
Dating was done by examining the lines used to draw the horse figure and head. The style of the lines is consistent with pottery from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BC).
“The discovery of horse art in Shang Dynasty-style rock paintings suggests that horses were introduced to China around 3,000 years ago,” said Zhang Chunlong, lead author of a paper on the discovery and professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing.
Tao Hong, a professor at Peking University who studies Chinese prehistory but wasn’t involved in the work, said horses were probably first domesticated in East Asia and then migrated westward many centuries later along trade routes.
The study’s authors, led by Hongen Jiang of the Shanghai Museum, studied the lines of the animal figures and head to help date the art. The horse designs were painted in black ink on pieces of limestone that had been broken off from a larger rock.
This rock art was found at Baima Cao, a site in Xinjiang province (map), which has been known for its petroglyphs since around 1900. The area is notable for its “outstanding examples of primitive drawings,” according to the Natural History Museum in London.
Tibetan art is famous for its depictions of horses, but these images are small—no more than three inches high, or about seven centimeters. That’s why the new discovery is so important: It shows that early Tibetan artists included large designs featuring horses and cattle as well.
The drawings also include images of camels and sheep, which suggest that people in this region domesticated them by at least 2,300 B.C.—around 500 years earlier than previously believed.”
The art of the horse is at least 3,300 years old, according to two lines of evidence. Researchers have uncovered horse paintings in China that may be the earliest known rock art anywhere. The finding may upend a long-standing theory that such paintings originated in Europe.
Tao Wang and his colleagues present their findings in the Dec. 19 Science.**
Rock art found in northwestern China depicts horses in line and silhouette form, suggesting that horseback riding was known 3,300 years ago, archaeologists say.
The rock art was first discovered in 2006 during an archaeological survey of a rock shelter located in the Junggar Basin of China’s Xinjiang region.
Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have excavated more than 1,100 square feet (100 square meters) of the site since 2007. The paintings are thought to date back to between 2,000 B.C. and 1,500 B.C., based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal remains found at the base of some paintings and pottery shards used as paint brushes.
The researchers also deduced that horses were depicted in line and silhouette forms — rather than as solid masses — which suggests that horseback riding existed during that era in this area.
“The rediscovery [of this site] is very important because it has significant meaning for understanding the origins of horseback riding,” study lead author Chang Song said in a statement. “It is also helpful for dating ancient cultural relics and sites, as well as establishing their functions.”
Horse art dating back to the third millennium BC has been discovered in northwest China, archaeologists have said.
A Chinese team of researchers has discovered thousands of rock art images in the Xiaoheyan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, a group of limestone caves and grottoes in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. The rock art, which dates to between 1800 B.C. and 1100 B.C., includes depictions of humans, animals, and symbols.
One such image is a horse, which the researchers believe are a unique find among Neolithic Era art. “The lines depicting the three-dimensional body of the horse are drawn with remarkable precision,” said Liu Guozheng, a researcher at Shaanxi Normal University who led the study that was published Sunday in the journal Science Bulletin .
“It’s not only rare for this time period; it’s one of only a few from the Neolithic era.” The discovery also supports evidence that horses were domesticated by people from the eastern Eurasian Steppe around 3500 B.C., Liu said. The color red was used to depict parts of the horse that would have been covered with hair (such as its coat) while black and white were used for areas with little or no hair, such as those on its face and hooves.
The remains were discovered by a joint team of Chinese and French researchers led by archaeologists at the French School of the Far East, along with scientists from France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and China’s Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
