from NBC News

World’s oldest cave painting is at least 51,200 years old, scientists say

The cave painting in Indonesia is also the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art, according to an international team of researchers who used a new dating technique.

By Mithil Aggarwal

It may not look like much - just a patchy sketch of three people surrounding a big red pig. But this humble cave painting found in Indonesia is the oldest known narrative artwork ever made by human hands, dating back more than 51,000 years, new research said on July 3, 2024. "This is the oldest evidence of storytelling," Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Australia's Griffith University, told AFP.
A 51,000-year-old artwork that was found in a cave on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island in 2017 in an image Australia’s Griffith University released Wednesday.Griffith University / AFP – Getty Images

A cave painting in Indonesia is the oldest such artwork in the world, dating back at least 51,200 years, according to an international team of researchers who say its narrative scene also makes it the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art.

While it is unclear exactly what the painting depicts, it most likely shows three small human-bird hybrids surrounding a massive wild pig, “which they were probably hunting,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

It’s that storytelling that has captivated scientists. 

“That is something new, something very important, something that happened much older than we thought,” said Joannes-Boyau, who is also a professor at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia.

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