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- The oldest example of figurative cave art has been discovered in the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi by Australian and Indonesian scientists. The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old, more than 5,000 years older than the previous oldest cave art.
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The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old, more than 5,000 years older than the previous oldest cave art.
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Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known...
- Indonesia
- Overview
- Early glimmers of art
- Changing conversations
The depiction of a warty pig adds to the mounting number of cave art finds throughout Indonesia.
Some 45,500 years ago, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, ancient humans ventured into a cave and sketched out the rotund form of a native pig, complete with a bristly back and face warts. Archaeologists now believe this portly swine marks the oldest drawing of a creature yet discovered anywhere in the world.
In a study published this week in Science Advances, an image of the drawing shows the animal apparently looking at two other pigs mid-squabble. The outlines of two human hands are positioned near the rump of the pig, and a bristly patch in the center of the mix might hint at a fourth creature.
The painting, made with strokes of red ocher on the interior cave walls, was discovered in December 2017 by local archaeologist Basran Burhan, currently a Ph.D. student at Australia's Griffith University. He led a small team to search caves in South Sulawesi for traces of ancient human activity when he discovered the newfound pig art at a site known as Leang Tedongnge.
According to Adam Brumm, first author of the new study and archaeologist at Australia's Griffith University, the ancient porcine painting may depict prime hunting trophies.
“They’re very, very, small little pigs, but these ancient artists portrayed them with such resplendent fatness, which I imagine was something to do with their interest in killing the largest and fattest pigs they could find, which yielded the largest amount of meat and protein,” he says.
To determine when the large pig painting was created, an international team of researchers relied on radioactive uranium, which naturally forms in limestone. As water percolates through the cave, it dissolves bits of the limestone and its uranium, depositing them both in thin sheets along the cave walls. Since uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, scientists can estimate a minimum age for the art by analyzing the relative amounts of these two elements.
The researchers used a small chisel to remove a knobby cluster of minerals deposited on the rear leg of the most complete pig figure for uranium-thorium dating, and the results indicated that the painting was at least 45,500 years old. It's also possible the paintings are even older, since this method only dates the mineral deposits on top of the art and not the painting itself.
Without additional dating of the other elements in the scene, the authors can't yet confirm if the entire mural was created all at once. One of the partial pigs is made of two different color pigments, which the authors note might reflect multiple periods of painting.
Study co-author Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia, says he gained fresh respect for the ancient artists as he digitally traced photographs of the figures for the study.
Left:
Leang Tedongnge, the cave where the oldest pig painting was found, is at the edge of a lush valley surrounded by towering rock cliffs.
Until recently, much of the scholarly conversation around sophisticated cave paintings has centered on Europe. The menageries that race across the walls of southern France's Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave date to roughly 36,000 years old. The herd of bison dancing on the ceiling of Altamira in northern Spain are from the same time period. And the crowd of outstretched hands and red disks of Spain's Castillo cave date back more than 40,800 years.
But in 2014, a team including Aubert and Brumm flipped the script when they announced the discovery of cave paintings on Sulawesi that were at least 39,900 years old. Up to then, the artworks were presumed to be no more than 12,000 years old.
“It really erodes that idea of Europe being the finishing school of human evolution,” Nowell says. While the newfound creature is just a smidgen older than the previous record-holder, its discovery adds even more depth to the art in the region.
"Some people could say it’s just another pig," Nowell says. "But that’s not the point, it really speaks to a larger sustained change in behavior."
The increasing number of discoveries in Indonesia suggests the possibility that complex artistry could have developed independently in Europe and Asia, Aubert says. Or perhaps humans already had the capacity for such works of art when they trekked out of Africa, “and now we’re starting to find traces of it wherever they went.”
The age of the newfound art also starts to fill a 20,000-year-long blank spot in the archaeological record as ancient humans island-hopped through what is now Indonesia to Australia. Recent excavations in northern Australia have revealed the presence of modern humans at least 65,000 years ago, while evidence for human activity in Indonesia appears to begin 20 millennia later.
Jan 13, 2021 · Maxime Aubert. A prehistoric artist’s realistic portrayal of a wild pig, warts and all, might just be the oldest known example of a painting that depicts the animal world. Four years ago,...
- Brian Handwerk
Jul 3, 2024 · July 3 (Reuters) - On the ceiling of a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists have discovered artwork depicting three human-like figures interacting with a wild pig in...
Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known animal cave painting in Indonesia - a wild pig - believed to be drawn 45,500 years ago. Painted using dark red ochre pigment, the...
Jan 14, 2021 · Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world’s oldest-known representational artwork: three wild pigs painted deep in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi at least 45,500 years ago. The ancient images, revealed this week in the journal Science Advances, were found in Leang Tedongnge cave.
Oct 24, 2021 · Archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest known animal cave painting in Indonesia. A panel showing wild pigs believed to have been made 45,500 years ago was found in a cave in a remote valley...
