Is this cave painting the world’s oldest story?

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Many thousands of years ago, one or more stone-age humans used a red-hued ochre pigment to depict what looks like a pig hunt on the wall of a cave on what is now the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

Scientists have just dated the image to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the oldest example of visual storytelling on Earth by at least several thousand years.

“In contrast to single-figure depictions, the agency of the juxtaposed figures constituting a narrative scene allows a story to be told through images in a manner that does not require the producer of the art to be present to convey the narrative to an audience,” the researchers note in their paper, published this week in the journal Nature.

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“Painted at least 51,200 years ago, this narrative composition, which depicts human-like figures interacting with a pig, is now the earliest known surviving example of representational art, and visual storytelling, in the world,” they add. “Our findings show that figurative portrayals of anthropomorphic figures and animals have a deeper origin in the history of modern human image-making than recognized to date.”

Sulawesi has long been known as a trove for ancient cave paintings. In 2019, archaeologists found an almost 44,000-year-old painting of humans and animals in a scene, making it at the time the oldest narrative cave art. Then in 2021 came the discovery of the oldest picture of a single animal, a warty pig from at least 45,000 years ago. (They still live in the region.)

The new dating technique used in the latest study is called laser-ablation uranium-series imaging, and it involves using a laser to zap a tiny patch of rock, smaller than a millimetre in diameter. Paintings on limestone cave walls are typically covered by a thin, transparent layer of calcite, the same material that forms stalactites and stalagmites. Calcite contains uranium from groundwater that slowly decays into thorium. The ratio of these elements on top of the painting reveals how long since it was made.

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While a great deal of the paper is devoted to this measuring technique — which is described as efficient, relatively non-invasive and very accurate — there is some evident pride in the local nature of the images, and their ability “to transmit particular narratives (such as myths) over long periods of time, especially when combined with oral traditions.”

The researchers note: “On the basis of our dating work, it now seems that depictions of anthropomorphic figures … interacting with animals appear in the Late Pleistocene cave art of Sulawesi at a frequency not seen elsewhere until tens of millennia later in Europe. This implies that a rich culture of storytelling developed at an early period in the long history of H. sapiens in this region — in particular, the use of scenic representation to tell visual stories about human–animal relationships.”

The paper also notes that “the actions taking place among the figures in this scene are difficult to interpret,” and may not even involve hunting. The narrative might not even be more complex than “We found a pig!” As storytelling goes, it’s a long way from The Three Little Pigs, Lord of the Flies or Nicolas Cage in the movie Pig. But it’s clearly an early, important step on the road to such tales.

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