World’s oldest picture story dating back 51,000 years found in Indonesian cave

A cave painting of human figures and a wild pig dating back 51,000 years is believed to be the oldest evidence of human storytelling.

The image discovered in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is thought to be the oldest human artwork in the world.

While Neanderthals are known to have made their own cave art, which predates that of Homo sapiens, the cave painting in Indonesia is more complex than the simple static, isolated images created by our hominid cousins.

Scientists said that the pig and the three people, depicted as stick men, is the “earliest known surviving evidence for imaginative storytelling”.

A new form of analysis created by researchers from Griffith University and Southern Cross University in Australia was able to analyse the age of calcium carbonate that had formed on top of the artwork and dated the image of humans and a large pig as being more than 51,000 years old, more than 4,000 years older than previously thought.

The researchers say the artwork could be even older and that the new uranium-based technique could “revolutionise rock art dating”.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana, the study’s lead author, said: “Humans have probably been telling stories for much longer than 51,200 years, but as words do not fossilise we can only go by indirect proxies like depictions of scenes in art – and the Sulawesi art is now the oldest such evidence by far that is known to archaeology.”

The authors of the research said that while the exact story being told remains unknown, it is obvious that the characters in the art make up some kind of larger story.

A previous study by the same team found the oldest evidence of a hunting sequence in rock art, also in Sulawesi, which was around 44,000 years old and shows pigs being hunted.

The newly-analysed artwork is older than this but it is unclear if it is a hunting scene.

Prof Adam Brumm, the study’s co-author, said: “Our discovery suggests that storytelling was a much older part of human history, and the history of art in particular, than previously thought.”

He added that it is clear the original artist wanted to create a narrative with the images.

“We can see that a story is going on here,” he said. “We have now dated this scene to 51,200 years ago, making it the oldest known narrative depiction in the world.

“We don’t know what the stories were about, but we know there were stories taking place.”

In the paper, which was published by the journal Nature, the scientists wrote: “Our findings show that figurative portrayals of anthropomorphic figures and animals have a deeper origin in the history of modern human (Homo sapiens) image-making than recognized to date, as does their representation in composed scenes.”