World’s oldest cave painting in Indonesian park unveils the deep prehistory of art

At first glance, the importance of the image adorning the wall of a remote cave in central Indonesia is easy to miss.

The image, shown to reporters by archaeologists during a recent online press conference, is comprised of faded red splotches blending almost imperceptibly against the rock. An untrained eye, like this author’s, wouldn’t notice anything significant.

The trained archaeologists know better.

Look more carefully, they said, and a scene begins springing to life: human-like figures interacting in some way with a large, rotund quadruped animal with an unmistakable snout. The image becomes clearer thanks to their professional guidance and a digitally enhanced version they helpfully produced.

This image, the scientists said, is the world’s oldest known cave painting, created more than 50,000 years ago.

“This scene depicts a pig, a representation of a wild pig, and it seems to be confronting or interacting in some way with these three human-like figures,” Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology at Griffith University, said as he walked journalists through the amazing discovery he and his colleagues are credited for.

Some of the “humans” depicted in the cave painting appear to have animal heads of their own. This is also significant, the archaeologists explained.

This particular painting found deep in a cave in the southwestern corner of the island of Sulawesi has been known to science for a decade. It is just one set of a series of hundreds of paintings found inside the karst caves of the Maros Pangkep Geopark region.

Using new aging techniques, Brumm and his colleagues have discovered something more—this painting’s deep history.

These scientists now say that this cave painting—the image of a pig being chased, harassed, or possibly hunted by supernatural human-animal figures—is now understood to be the oldest cave painting known to exist. Humans put it on this cave wall roughly 51,200 years ago.

That’s more than 7,000 years older than the former record holder.

Art older than the last Ice Age

Previously, the world’s oldest known cave paintings were dated to around 44,000 years ago. That meant human art was understood to be at least that old.

This discovery in Indonesia pushes the prehistory of art even further back.

Far more is revealed in the image of the pig confronting humans, the Griffith University researchers explained.

These haunting depictions of scenes from long, long ago provide further evidence that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were creative and fully capable of imaging and sharing spiritual and supernatural tales in their art and cultures.

“Storytelling is a hugely important part of human evolution,” Brumm said. “But finding evidence for it in art, especially in very early cave art, is exceptionally rare.”

The depiction of half-human, half-animal figures in art is an example of therianthropy, said Brumm.

In addition to being the earliest example of art and storytelling in art, this ancient painting found in a cave known to the locals as Leang Karampuang may be the earliest-known depiction of religion.

“It provides evidence for the ability to image the existence of a supernatural being, something that does not exist in real life,” Brumm explained.

Game-changing find

Though they’ve been familiar with the painting in Leang Karampuang for a while, they’ve only been able to somewhat accurately date the find thanks to new techniques.

“We co-developed a new method to date rock art,” said Griffith University archaeologist and geochemist Maxime Aubert. The method involved dating the calcium carbonate that has gradually overlaid the cave painting over thousands of years.

“The analysis of tiny layers of calcium carbonate which formed on the art since it was painted has revealed that the underlying artwork must be at least 51,200 years old,” said Steven Mew with the Australian Science Media Centre, “which makes it the oldest known evidence of storytelling in art in the world.”

There is just the latest discovery pushing back the known history of modern humans.

Earlier, scientists confirmed that humans have inhabited North America at least 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Now we know our ancestors have been expressing themselves imaginatively and spiritually through storytelling art for over 7,000 years longer than we previously knew.

Brumm took pains to emphasize to journalists the historic nature of their discovery.

This cave painting, he stressed, is “the world’s earliest-known surviving evidence for imaginative storytelling and the use of scenes in art,” thus “making it the oldest known rock art attributed to our species and the earliest surviving example of figurative depiction.”

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