Cave Art From 51,000 Years Ago May Be 'Oldest Evidence' of Picture Stories

A prehistoric painting in Indonesia has been dated to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the earliest known example of "figurative" cave art in the world and perhaps the oldest known surviving example of a narrative scene, a team of researchers has proposed in a study.

Figurative artworks are those that are not abstract designs and clearly depict real things, such as animals, humans (or their body parts) and other objects.

According to a study published in the journal Nature, not only is the painting the earliest documented figurative art, it is also possibly the oldest known surviving example of "visual storytelling"—or a narrative scene—in the world.

The newly described painting is located in the limestone cave of Leang Karampuang in the Maros-Pangkep region of Sulawesi, an Indonesian island.

Narrative cave art "shows that the painter(s) is/are conveying more information about images than just individual static images—they are telling us how to look at them in association," Maxime Aubert, an author of the study with Griffith University in Australia, told Newsweek. "We, as humans, define ourselves as a species that tells stories, and these are the oldest evidence of us doing that."

But one independent expert who was not involved in the research—Wil Roebroeks, a professor of Paleolithic Archaeology from Leiden University in the Netherlands—told Newsweek that while the dating work in the study was "solid," the "narrative" interpretation of the art is open to debate.

Previous dating research has indicated that Sulawesi is home to some of the oldest known rock art in the world. That work was based on a technique known as uranium-series dating (U-series), which researchers used to analyze deposits of the mineral calcite (a form of calcium carbonate) overlying the art in the limestone caves of the Maros-Pangkep region.

In the latest study, Aubert and colleagues used a novel application of this approach that they developed—called laser-ablation U-series imaging (LA-U-series)—to re-date some of the earliest cave art in the area and determine the age of stylistically similar works at other sites in the region.

"We have previously used the uranium-series method to date very old rock art in two parts of Indonesia—Sulawesi and Borneo—but our new LA-U-series technique is more accurate, allowing us to date the earliest calcium carbonate layers formed on the art and get closer to the point in time the art was created. It will revolutionize rock art dating," Aubert said in a press release.

It is typically challenging to date prehistoric rock art in an accurate and reliable manner, but Aubert told Newsweek the LA-U series approach was a "huge improvement" over the U-series analysis in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

"It also requires much smaller samples, considerably reducing the physical aspect of sampling precious rock art," he said.

Using the novel LA-U approach, the researchers dated the painting at Leang Karampuang, which depicts a wild pig and what the authors interpret as three human-like figures interacting with it. The method yielded a minimum age of 51,200 years ago, pushing back previous dates for paintings on the island by at least 5,700 years.

The previous earliest example of figurative rock art in the world was a painting of a pig on Sulawesi—at the Leang Tedongnge site in Maros-Pangkep—dated to a minimum of around 45,500 years ago, according to Aubert.

In the latest study, the authors also analyzed a painting at the Leang Bulu' Sipong 4 site in Maros-Pangkep, which had previously been dated to at least 43,900 years ago using the U-series approach. This painting, which Aubert and colleagues interpret as a hunting scene, was already considered by the researchers to be one of the oldest examples of figurative rock art in the word, and one of the oldest narrative scenes.

Using the novel technique, the team found that this painting was older than previously thought—likely dating to around 48,000 years ago.

According to the study authors, the latest findings indicate that figurative portrayals of anthropomorphic figures and animals have an earlier origin in human history than previously thought.

"The earliest Sulawesi rock art is not 'simple'—it is quite advanced and shows the mental capacity of people at the time," Aubert said. "It also suggests that this capacity must have a much older origin, probably in Africa, and that older rock art are probably waiting discovery and dating."

"We believe that these paintings were made my modern humans, but we cannot completely exclude that other human species could have also made them."

Previous research by another team had dated cave paintings at three sites in Spain to a minimum age of around 64,000 years old, making them potentially the world's oldest known examples. They proposed that these works were created by Neanderthals—because modern humans were not present in the region at the time—although it should be noted that this art is not figurative, consisting of only dots, lines and hand stencils. (The dating evidence for this finding has been questioned by some researchers, including Aubert, although the authors have responded to such criticisms.)

Roebroeks said the latest study marks an "important contribution" with the team's data indicating that the figurative cave art from Sulawesi dates back to at least 51,200 years ago—older than anywhere else thus far. But he said the conclusion of Aubert and colleagues that the paintings represent narrative scenes should be viewed with caution.

"The dating side of the paper looks solid to me, as an archaeologist," he said. "I am less convinced by the authors' 'narrative' interpretation of these two panels. They conclude that (most of) the art was meant to illustrate a story, and hence implicitly assume that a major part of the panel was a composition, executed in one go, organized to illustrate the narrative, rather than the figures on the panel being the result of various independent painting events."

Roebroeks also said, in his view, that the team's interpretation that "human-like" figures are present close to the pig in the heavily weathered panel at Leang Karampuang is "not immediately clear".

"What is clear is that the admirable work of the authors over the last decade has substantially increased our knowledge of Pleistocene art in a part of the world for which hardly anything was known in this domain before," Roebroeks said.

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Update 07/03/24, 1:42 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional comment from Wil Roebroeks and Maxime Aubert.