Adam Blum, professor of archaeology at Griffith University’s Australian Centre for Human Evolution Research and author of the study published in Nature on Thursday, said this was evidence that humans had the ability to tell stories in the distant past.
“Storytelling is a really important part of human evolution and may even help explain why humans have been successful,” he said at a briefing about the research. “But it’s extremely rare to find evidence of it in artwork, especially very early cave paintings.”
“We don’t know exactly what is happening in this scene,” he added of the cave painting, “but it clearly tells some kind of story revolving around an interaction between three human-like figures and a pig.”
The inhabitants of Sulawesi around 50,000 BCE were obsessed with pig painting, and they featured pigs repeatedly in their cave art, Blum said. Archaeological evidence indicates they hunted this species, called the Celebes warthog. The caves were located on high ground, which would have been inconvenient for daily life, suggesting they may have painted there specifically for painting, or as part of some other special practice, he added.
“The discovery of early cave paintings in Sulawesi gives us what I believe to be the world’s oldest surviving evidence of imaginative storytelling through the use of scenes in art,” he said.
The site is a hotbed of important cave art discoveries. Recent discoveries in Sulawesi date back to 40,000 to 44,000 years ago, making them the oldest cave paintings ever discovered. The area preserves the remains of at least 300 cave and shelter paintings, although many have not been studied in detail.
A team of researchers, jointly led by Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and Australia’s Griffith and Southern Cross Universities, used a new dating method that analyzed a layer of calcium carbonate that had been deposited on top of the painting, and revised the age of the 44,000-year-old work to closer to 48,000 years ago.
Scientists believe the world’s oldest cave art was made by Neanderthals: About 65,000 years ago, an extinct human relative left handprints, lines and shapes in three caves in what is now Spain — at least 20,000 years before modern humans are thought to have arrived on the continent.
The famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France have been dated up to about 21,000 years ago.