An international team of archaeologists has announced that the world’s oldest illustrated story is a cave painting that predates the previous record holder by some 6,000 years and was discovered on the same Indonesian island, about 10 kilometers away.
The paintings, believed to be at least 51,200 years old, were discovered in the Leang Karampuang cave on the eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi, researchers from Griffith University, Southern Cross University and Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency wrote in the journal. Nature.
The samples were collected in 2017, but the date was unknown until earlier this year.
The previous record holder was a life-size painting of a wild pig in the Reang Thedonggae cave, thought to be at least 45,500 years old.
The recently discovered painting depicts three therianthropes (human-animal hybrids) and a wild pig.
Lead author Adi Agus Octaviana, a PhD student at Griffith University, said the discovery was “very surprising… apart from some controversial discoveries in Spain, none of Europe’s well-known Ice Age artworks are this old.”
The Spanish scientists Previously argued The rock art found in three locations in Cantabria, Andalusia and Extremadura has been found to be more than 64,000 years old, but Dr Tristan Jones, a rock art expert at the University of Sydney, says the finds have been “largely rejected by the international scientific community”.
Jones said it was unclear whether the Spanish researchers dated the limestone that formed on top of the artwork, or if the limestone formed elsewhere. The discovery was also controversial because the researchers claimed Neanderthals created the art. Previously, it was thought that only modern humans created art.
Jones said the Spanish researchers have not definitively proven that the crust formed over the rock art, which researchers say was made by Neanderthals, making the find controversial.
The discovery contradicts scholarly opinion that early figurative cave art consisted of panels featuring single figures, rather than scenes of human interaction.
The researchers used uranium series dating to date the layer of calcium carbonate that formed on top of the artwork, by extracting a limestone sample and vaporizing it with a laser. The age of the sample was calculated by measuring the ratio of thorium to uranium.
The researchers said this method allows them to more accurately date the layers by preventing new and old material from mixing together.
The researchers also dated what were previously thought to be the world’s oldest cave paintings, found in the nearby Leang Bulu Shipon 4 cave, and found that the paintings, previously thought to be at least 44,000 years old, are actually at least 48,000 years old.
But the site of the oldest known cave paintings, at Leang Thedonggae, had no remaining calcium carbonate material and could not be dated using the new method.
Jones said the new technique is “a major step forward in increasing the resolution and precision of dating,” adding that rock art is typically very difficult to date because it’s made primarily of minerals.
Professor Adam Blum of Griffith University, who co-led the study, said depictions of warthogs had been frequently found in hundreds of excavations in the region. “Warthogs were clearly important economically to these elites,” he said. “We can see that they were also important symbolically and probably spiritually.”
But the researchers said the events taking place in the work were “difficult to interpret” and it was unclear which animals inspired the human-animal hybrids, as they were depicted as “essentially stick figures”.
“For some reason… early humans… [are] “Very few figures were depicted that could be interpreted as human,” Blum said. “Animals were often depicted with incredible anatomical fidelity, but [early cave painters] You don’t have to put in as much effort to do that.”
He said researchers are fairly certain that one of the human-animal hybrids would be a human with a bird’s head, while the other would have a civet’s tail.
“Storytelling is a really important part of human evolution and may help explain our success, yet evidence of it in art, especially very early cave paintings, is extremely rare.”
