50,000-year-old picture of a pig is the oldest known narrative art

A new radiometric dating technique reveals that cave paintings on Sulawesi, Indonesia, are even older than previously thought, pushing back the earliest evidence of storytelling

By James Woodford

3 July 2024

Tracing of the cave painting showing a pig and human-like figures from Leang Karampuang on Sulawesi, Indonesia

Griffith University

A painting of a pig with human-like figures in an Indonesian cave is at least 51,200 years old, making it the earliest known example of representational art in the world.

“We like to define ourselves as a species that tells stories, and this is the oldest evidence of that,” says Maxime Aubert at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.

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The pig artwork was discovered in 2017 on the ceiling of the limestone cave of Leang Karampuang on the island of Sulawesi.

In 2019, Aubert and his colleagues dated a hunting scene from a nearby cave named Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 to a minimum of 43,900 years old.

Now, they have used a new, more accurate technique to estimate the ages of both artworks. They found that the image at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 is actually more than 4000 years older than previously thought – and the Leang Karampuang art is even older.