Archaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest cave painting: a life-size image of a wild pig made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia.
The discovery, described in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, provides the first evidence of human settlement in the region.
Co-author Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University told AFP that he was found on the island of Sulawesi in 2017 by doctoral student Basran Burhan, as part of research the team was conducting with Indonesian officials.
Leang Tedongnge Cave is located in a remote valley surrounded by limestone cliffs, about an hour’s walk from the nearest road.
It is only accessible during the dry season because of flooding during the rainy season – and members of the isolated Bugis community told the team that it had never been seen by Westerners before.
Measuring 136 cm by 54 cm (53 in by 21 in.), The warty pig Sulawesi was painted with dark red ocher pigment and has a short ridge of upright hair, as well as a pair of horn-like facial warts characteristic of adult males in species.
There are two handprints above the pig’s hind quarters, and it appears to be facing two other pigs that are only partially preserved, as part of a narrative scene.
“The pig appears to be watching a struggle or social interaction between two other warty pigs,” said co-author Adam Brumm.
Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years and they are a key feature of the region’s prehistoric art, especially during the ice age.
Aubert, a dating expert, identified a deposit of calcite that formed on top of the painting, then used isotope dating from the uranium series to safely say that the deposit was 45,500 years old.
This makes the painting at least that old, “but it could be much older because the dating we are using dates only to the calcite on top of it,” he explained.
“The people who did it were totally modern, they were like us, they had all the capacity and tools to make any painting they liked,” he added.
The previously oldest rock art painting was found by the same team in Sulawesi. It depicted a group of figures partly human and partly animals hunting mammals, and it turned out to be at least 43,900 years old.
Cave paintings like these also help to fill in the gaps in our understanding of early human migrations.
It is known that people arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago, but they would probably have to cross the islands of Indonesia, known as “Wallacea”.
This site now represents the oldest evidence of humans in Wallacea, but more research is expected to help show that people were in the region much earlier, which would solve the Australian settlement puzzle.
The team believes that the art was made by Homo sapiens, unlike extinct human species like Denisovans, but I can’t say that for sure.
To make the handprints, the artists would have to place their hands on a surface and then spit out pigment on it, and the team hopes to try to extract DNA samples from the residual saliva.