51,000-year old cave painting oldest evidence of storytelling

51,200-year-old cave painting found in Leang Karampuang cave on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island has been determined as the world’s oldest narrative artwork, an international team of archeologists announced Wednesday. 

“This is the oldest evidence of storytelling,” Australian Archeologist Maxime Aubert told AFP.

Researchers used a new method that included lasers and computer software to calculate the age of the rocks, which Aubert describes as a more precise, easier, quicker, and cheaper technique since it ensured younger and older materials were not combined.

Dr. Tristan Jones, a rock art expert from the University of Sydney, described the new technique as “a major leap forward in tightening up the resolution and accuracy of dating.”

The cave painting was originally found and sampled in 2017. The painting is in poor condition and difficult to interpret, according to the researchers, but it appears it depicts three therianthropes (human-animal hybrids) around a warty wild pig – a frequent theme found in hundreds of excavations.

“Storytelling is a hugely important part of human evolution and possibly even helps to explain our success as a species, but finding evidence for it in art, especially in very early cave art, is exceptionally rare,” Griffith University Professor Adam Brumm said, adding that the researchers are certain one of the therianthropes is human with a bird head. 

The former world recorder holder was estimated to be approximately 45,500 years old and was found in a cave at Leang Tedongnge, showcasing a lifesize picture of a wild pig.

Archeological controversy

Back in 2018, Spanish scientists claimed the existence of cave artworks that are over 64,000 years old at three different sites – Cantabria, Andalusia, and Extremadura. However, Dr. Jones stated those findings were rejected by the global science community due to their controversial nature.

Jones stated that it was unclear whether the Spanish researchers dated limestone that had formed on top of the art or if the limestone had formed elsewhere, resulting in controversial findings since they argued that Neanderthals made the art, contradicting the previous belief that only modern humans created art.

The findings challenged the scholarly belief that early primitive cave art primarily featured single-figure panels rather than depictions of figures interacting with one another.

Amateur archaeologist finds and decodes ice-age cave drawings in EU

An amateur archaeologist claimed to have discovered a primitive writing system in January 2023, dating back to the ice age, describing the 20,000-year-old markings as a form of a lunar calendar.

Ben Bacon’s research indicates that the drawings found in the cave were not mere art but also a record of the timing of animals’ reproductive cycles, which Bacon calls the “proto-writing” system. He collaborated with a team consisting of two professors from Durham University and one from University College London, to publish the research in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

One of the professors, Prof Paul Pettitt, who is also an archaeologist at Durham University, expressed he was “glad he took it seriously” when he was contacted by the researcher. “The results show that ice age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar.”