Archaeologists have found in Indonesia the oldest known animal cave painting in the world – a wild pig – thought to have been drawn 45,500 years ago.
The life-sized image of the warty Sulawesi pig, painted using dark red ochre pigment, appears to be part of a storytelling sequence.
The image was found on the island of Sulawesi in the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote valley.
It provides the earliest evidence of the region’s human settlement.
“The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked,” said Maxime Aubert, the co-author of the report published in Science Advances journal.
Aubert, a dating expert, had found a layer of calcite that had formed on top of the painting and used the dating isotope of the Uranium-series to determine that the deposit was 45,500 years old.
This makes the artwork ancient, at least. “But it could be much older because the dating that we’re using only dates the calcite on top of it,” he added.
The study notes that a pig with horn-like facial warts typical of adult males of the species is depicted in the painting, which measures 136cm by 54cm (53in by 21in).
Above the back of the pig are two handprints, which also appear to face two other pigs that are only partly preserved.
Co-author Adam Brumm said: “The pig appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs.”
The artists would have had to put their hands on a surface before vomiting pigment over it to make the handprints, the researchers said. The team hopes to try to also collect samples of DNA from the residual saliva.
Painting may be the oldest art portraying a figure in the world, but it is not the oldest art made by man.
In South Africa, it is claimed that the oldest known drawing is a hashtag-like doodle created 73,000 years ago.
Source: BBC