The genesis of human art has been pushed back yet again with the discovery of a painting featuring a wild pig and a trio of human-looking figures. The cave painting, discovered in Sulawesi in Indonesia by a team of Indonesian and Australian scientists, is five thousand years older than the most ancient cave art previously known.
Art is the most reliable proxy for determining whether humans of a given era had the capacity for creativity and abstract thought, and this discovery reveals that humans have had the same style of cognition for at least 51,200 years.
Maxime Aubert , a professor from Australia’s Griffith University, told the BBC that the discovery changes the way that biologists and anthropologists understand human evolution. The painting, he says, tells a complex story, and comprises the oldest evidence yet discovered for storytelling. It shows that humans of the time were using narrative to make sense of the world around them.
The painting depicts a pig, with an open mouth, standing still while three human arrayed around it. The largest human appears to be extending both arms and holding a rod in its hands. The second human, is depicted immediately in front of the pig next to the snout. The final figure seems to be upside down with its legs splayed outwards and sticking up, with one hand reaching out for the head of the pig.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, who hails from Jakarta’s National Research and Innovation Agency, is the specialist in Indonesian rock art who led the research team. He says that narrative storytelling has now been shown to be an integral part of early Indonesian culture. Humans, he believes, have been telling stories for far longer than just the 51,200 years that the painting reveals, but unfortunately spoken words do not fossilize. The art left behind by our ancestors are the only way we have to measure them, inadequate though that measure might be.