Researchers have identified the world's oldest storytelling cave drawing on the Indonesian island of Celebes. In the 51,200-year-old image, figures of a pig, half-animal, half-human are ejected, The Guardian Books.
The oldest image to date was about 6,000 years younger, but was also found nearby, 10 kilometres from Liang Karambang Cave. That image depicts a life-sized wild boar and could have been made 45,500 years ago.
The cave painting, now a record, was actually discovered in 2017, but the dating of the samples collected there has not yet been completed. The researchers used uranium-series dating to date the layers of calcium carbonate formed on the surface of the drawings. For this, samples of limestone were taken and then vaporized with a laser. The age of the sample was calculated by measuring the ratio of thorium to uranium.
Cave drawings found in Indonesia are much older than Lascaux's paintings in France, and were probably created about 20,000 years ago.
The Griffith University researcher, lead author of the study on Indonesian cave art, found his discovery very surprising. Until now, the scientific conclusion had been that early figurative cave art depicted figures isolated from each other, rather than figures interacting with each other. But in the corrected image, which shows three human-animal hybrids and a pig, a story is being told.
In the drawing in Liang Karambang Cave, the wild boar can still be clearly seen, but identifying the three animal-human hybrids is not so easy – Photo: Brin/Reuters
However, according to the researchers themselves, it is difficult to interpret the drawing, and it is not clear what animals inspired the human-animal hybrid, since it is basically stick-shaped.
The animals are depicted with incredible anatomical accuracy, but somehow they don’t strive for that in humans, and they’re not easy to identify in the drawings, said Adam Broome, a professor at Griffith University. The Broomes are pretty sure one of the human-animal hybrids was a human with the head of a bird, and another has a tail that they believe belongs to a civet cat.
“Storytelling is a very important part of human evolution and may explain our success as a species, but evidence of it in art, especially very early cave paintings, is extremely rare,” the researcher said.
