First-Known Painting Depicts Rare, Hefty Animal

The oldest known figurative cave painting, found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, depicts a babirusa, a hefty fruit-eating pig now nicknamed the “pig-deer.”

The cave art, reported in the journal Nature, also includes multiple human hand stencils and dates to around 40,000 years ago during the Ice Age. The oldest known rock art, found in Europe, would have been created around the same time.

“It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centerpiece of a ‘symbolic explosion’ in early human artistic activity, such as cave painting and other forms of image-making, including figurative art, around 40,000 years ago,” lead author Maxime Aubert of Griffith University told Discovery News.

“However,” he added, “our findings show that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins, perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe.”

The prehistoric images, from limestone caves near Maros in southern Sulawesi, have been known for a while, but researchers were uncertain about their age. Co-author Adam Brumm, also from Griffith University, noticed that small stalactite-like growths, called "cave popcorn,"’ had formed over the art.

The growths turned out to be an ideal medium for uranium-series dating. The dating only provides a minimum, so the cave art may even be much older than 40,000 years ago.

Aubert explained that the hand stencils were made by blowing, spraying or spitting a mouthful of liquid ochre pigment on the cave wall, leaving behind the hand shapes.

“The hands seem to belong to a wide range of ages, and possibly sexes, although this is difficult to determine,” Aubert said. “Certainly there are hands of both adults and children.”

As for the babirusa, this animal--although now rare -- still exists, and is thought to have been common in the lowland forests of the Maros karsts region of Indonesia 40,000 years ago. Now the question is, why did the early artists decide to immortalize one on a cave wall?

“What is most interesting about the early Sulawesian and European animal painting is not so much what the prehistoric artists depicted, but what they didn’t depict -- meaning, in both regions the set of animals present in the local environment was much wider than the set of animals represented in the art,” Brumm told Discovery News.

He continued, “What these hunter-gatherers overwhelmingly depicted, both in Europe, and Sulawesi, were large, and often dangerous, mammal species that possibly played major roles in the belief systems of these people. In that sense, therefore, differences in the actual techniques and methods used to produce the art in these widely separated regions are not as important as the common themes that drove these groups of artists to very selectively represent the worlds they inhabited.”

Aubert, Brumm and their colleagues believe that Homo sapiens created the art, but our species wasn't the only hominid present in Indonesia at the time.

Wil Roebroeks, author of an accompanying piece in Nature, told Discovery News that “the ‘modern human’ makers of the Sulawesi/Maros rock art probably differed slightly from the ‘modern humans’ in western Europe, in the sense that while both populations were overall of African descent with some Neanderthal admixture, a small part of the Sulawesi’s genetic ancestry probably also traced back to the famous Denisovans (another early hominid).”

Roebroeks, of Leiden University, added that just south of Sulawesi at the time, Homo floresiensis, aka the “Hobbit Human,” was still living.

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