INDONESIA: A teenage boy has married his 73-year-old lover in a remote village on Indonesia’s Sumatra, officials said, after the unconventional couple threatened a double suicide if their match was thwarted.
The romance began when septuagenarian Rohaya Binti Kiagus Muhammad Jakfar took care of her neighbor Selamet Riyadi, 15, who was suffering from malaria, the local village chief said.
“Selamet is too young to marry but we married them anyway because he threatened to commit suicide,” village chief Cik Ani, told AFP, adding local officials also wanted them to “avoid the sin of adultery.”
“Since the boy is an underage, we have decided to carry out the marriage privately,” he said.
Riyadi’s father died several years ago and the boy was not properly cared for by his mother, who has remarried, Ani said.
Rohaya has been married twice before, both times to divorcees and has at least one child from the marriages, but this time “she got a virgin,” Ani added.
The marriage took place Sunday in the remote Karang Endah village in South Sumatra province, but sparked national interest when a video of the couple’s wedding vows went viral on social media outlets.
“He said he was madly in love. We love each other,” Rohaya told reporters after the wedding.
The video shows the unlikely couple reciting their vows in front of their relatives and friends.
Under Indonesian law, the legal age for marriage is 19 for a man and 16 for a woman.
Indonesian teenage boy weds 73-year-old bride
Indonesian teenage boy weds 73-year-old bride
Archeologists discover world’s oldest artwork in Indonesia’s Sulawesi
- Newly dated artworks are believed to have been created by ancestors of indigenous Australians
- Discovery shows Sulawesi as one of world’s oldest centers of artistic culture, researcher says
JAKARTA: Hand stencils found in a cave in Indonesia’s Sulawesi are the world’s oldest known artworks, Indonesian and Australian archeologists have said in a new study that dates the drawings back to at least 67,800 years ago.
Sulawesi hosts some of the world’s earliest cave art, including the oldest known example of visual storytelling — a cave painting depicting human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. Found in 2019, it dates back at least 51,200 years.
On Muna, an island off the province’s southeast, researchers have discovered new artworks which are faint and partially obscured by a more recent motif on the wall. They used a new dating technique to determine their age.
The cave art is of two faded hand stencils, one at least 60,900 years old and another dating back at least 67,800 years. This makes it the oldest art to be found on cave walls, authors of the study, which was published this week, said in the journal Nature.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, or BRIN, and co-author, said this hand stencil was 16,600 years older than the rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi, and about 1,100 years older than stencils found in Spain believed to have been drawn by Neanderthals.
The discovery “places Indonesia as one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human seafaring. This discovery is the oldest reliably dated rock art and provides direct evidence that humans have been intentionally crossing the ocean since almost 70,000 years ago,” Oktaviana said on Wednesday.
The stencils are located in Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna that has been a tourist destination known for cave paintings that are about 4,000 years old.
“This discovery demonstrates that Sulawesi is one of the oldest and most continuous centers of artistic culture in the world, with roots dating back to the earliest phases of human habitation in the region,” said Prof. Maxime Aubert of Australia, another of the study’s co-authors.
To figure out the stencils’ ages, researchers used a technique called laser-ablation uranium-series dating, which allows for the accurate dating of ocher-based rock art. The method uses a laser to collect and analyze a tiny amount of mineral crusts that had formed on top of the art.
The study also explored how and when Australia first became settled, with the researchers saying the stencil was most likely created by the ancestors of indigenous Australians.
