This painted pig is the world’s oldest figurative art

Enlarge (credit: Brumm et al. 2021)

A pig painted on the wall of an Indonesian cave is the world's oldest figurative art-that is, it's the oldest known drawing of something, rather than an abstract design or a stencil.

The 45,500-year-old ocher painting depicts a Sulawesi warty pig, which appears to be watching a standoff between two other pigs. If that interpretation is correct, the painting is also a contender for the world's oldest narrative scene. And it hints at how much the earliest Indonesians observed and recorded about the animals and ecosystems around them. A growing pile of evidence tells us that the first people to reach the islands of Indonesia carried with them a culture of art and visual storytelling, as well as the means to cross the expanses of water between the islands, eventually reaching Australia.

Painted pig's feet, anyone?

Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm and his colleagues used uranium-series dating to measure the age of a mineral deposit that had formed above one of the pig's rear feet. As water flows through a limestone cave, it leaves behind small deposits of minerals, which gradually build up into layers of calcite, like the one atop the pig painting. The minerals in the water contain trace amounts of uranium, which gradually decays into different uranium isotopes and eventually into a completely different element, thorium. By measuring the amounts of uranium-234 and thorium-230 in a cave deposit (also called a speleothem) and then comparing that to the local groundwater, archaeologists can measure how long ago the speleothem formed.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments