Pig Painting May Be World's Oldest Cave Art Yet, Archaeologists Say

[brooklynite]

https://t.co/ylzGDVg4Zn" target="_blank">New York Times

In a hidden valley on an Indonesian island, there is a cave decorated with what may be the oldest figurative art ever glimpsed by modern eyes.

The vivid depiction of a wild pig, outlined and filled in with mulberry-hued pigment, dates back at least 45,500 years, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. It was discovered deep inside a cave called Leang Tedongnge in December 2017, during an archaeological survey led by Basran Burhan, a graduate student at Griffith University and co-author of the new research. The animal in the painting resembles the warty pig, a species still living today on the island of Sulawesi where the cave is.

Sulawesi was already considered by some experts to be the site of the earliest known representational cave art in the world. A captivating scene elsewhere on the island, which displays human-animal hybrids, was found to be at least 43,900 years old, reported by the same team in a 2019 study.

These examples of cave art, along with another pig figure spotted at a cave further south by Adhi Agus Oktavhiana, a graduate student at Griffith University and co-author of the study, hint at the rich cultures living on the Indonesian islands. The discoveries also open a debate over whether the artists could have been Homo sapiens, or members of another extinct human species.