The earliest painting evidence of narrative rock art that has been found is a 51,000-year-old painting found in the "art gallery" of a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
The artwork shows a human-like figure conversing with a warty pig, suggesting that people may have used art to communicate stories much longer than they previously believed.
Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University's Australian Research Center for Human Evolution and an author of the study published in Nature on Thursday, said it was proof that people could tell stories in the distant past.
"Storytelling is a hugely important part of human evolution, and possibly even it helps to explain our success as a species," he said in a briefing about the research. "But finding evidence for it in art, especially in very early cave art, is exceptionally rare."
Brumm admitted they do not know what is happening in this scene. However, he claimed that it clearly communicates a story involving the interaction between the three human-like figures and the pig. He noted that the Sulawesi residents of 50,000 B.C. or so were "besotted" with painting pigs, depicting them over and over again in cave art there.
Based on archeological evidence, it appears that they hunted the Celebes warty pig species. He continued that the elevated location of the cave would indicate that people went there specifically to paint or to paint as part of some other unique practice, given that it would not have been handy for daily living. The location is a hot spot for significant cave painting discoveries.
The previous oldest scene of cave art discovered in recent years was dated between 40,000 and 44,000 years old. At least 300 cave and shelter art sites in the region have been preserved, many of which have not received much attention.
Furthermore, the research team, co-led by Australia's Griffith University, Southern Cross University, and Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency, used a new dating technique by examining accumulated layers of calcium carbonate on top of the artwork. They moved the 44,000-year-old work's date closer to 48,000.
