Indonesian cave find pushes earliest evidence of storytelling back by more than 20,000 years.

A prehistoric painting depicting what looks to be a hunting scene pushes back the earliest evidence of human storytelling by more than 20,000 years.

Discovered on the wall of a limestone cave in the southern region of Sulawesi in Indonesia, it shows wild pigs and dwarf buffaloes being pursued – and possibly captured – by human-animal hybrids. 

As soon as archaeologist Maxime Aubert, from Australia’s Griffith University, set eyes on the images, he was gob-smacked. “I'd never seen anything like it,” he says. 

Aubert and colleagues have been conducting regular surveys of the limestone-rich region for several years, and it has proven to be a hot spot for some of the earliest cave art in the world. 

Aubert, M., Lebe, R., Oktaviana, A.A. et al. Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art. Nature (2019)

doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1806-y

Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories1. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling2,3,4,5, in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’2,5 that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures5. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes2,5, and of therianthropes6,7—abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on). In this record of creative expression (spanning from about 40 thousand years ago (ka) until the beginning of the Holocene epoch at around 10 ka), scenes in cave art are generally rare and chronologically late (dating to about 21–14 ka)7, and clear representations of therianthropes are uncommon6—the oldest such image is a carved figurine from Germany of a human with a feline head (dated to about 40–39 ka)8. Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

Extended Data Fig. 3: Details of pig 1 and pig 2.
Extended Data Fig. 3: Details of pig 1 and pig 2. - a, b, Pig 1 shown in a digital tracing (a) and a photograph enhanced using DStretch (b). c, Photograph of pig 2 enhanced using DStretch. Pig 1 measures 123 × 58 cm. The painting is badly weathered. Much of the body area, and some of the head and mouth, are missing owing to at least two temporally distinct phases of erosion and flaking of the cave-wall surface. In the time that separated these periods of weathering, three narrow-fingered hand stencils were created in the upper body area of the pig. No canine tusks are evident, but the animal is apparently portrayed with a row of premolars and molars in the maxilla and mandible; the teeth are sharp and thus possibly relatively unworn—perhaps indicating that the pig was a relatively young adult. No sexual characteristics are evident. Pig 2 measures 84 × 42 cm and is also substantially deteriorated: most of the head area, and considerable portions of the body, are missing. This pig is positioned to the rear of pig 1 and faces in the same direction as this larger suid. It appears as though it is following behind it. A prominent crest or tuft of head hair, represented by a row of short vertical lines on the crown, is evident in the surviving part of the head area; this is a diagnostic morphological trait of the endemic Sulawesi warty pig (S. celebensis).

Footnotes:

  1. Boyd, B. The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Cogn. Sci. 9, e1444 (2018).
  2. Azéma, M. & Rivère, F. Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema. Antiquity 86, 316–324 (2012).
  3. Mithen, S. in Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture (eds Renfrew, C. & Morley, I.) 123–134 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
  4. Wynn, T., Coolidge, F. & Bright, M. Hohlenstein-Stadel and the evolution of human conceptual thought. Camb. Archaeol. J. 19, 73–84 (2009)
  5. Davidson, I. in Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art (eds Davidson, I. & Nowell, A.) (Berghahn, in the press).
  6. Taçon, P. S. C. & Chippindale, C. in Theoretical Perspectives in Rock Art Research: ACRA: the Alta Conference on Rock Art (ed. Helskog, K.) 175–210 (Oslo: Novus forlag: lnstituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, 2001).
  7. Bahn, P. G. & Vertut, J. Journey through the Ice Age (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997).
  8. Kind, C.-J., Ebinger-Rist, N., Wolf, S., Beutelspacher, T. & Wehrberger, K. The smile of the Lion Man. Recent excavations in Stadel Cave (Baden-Württemberg, south-western Germany) and the restoration of the famous Upper Palaeolithic figurine. Quartär 61, 129–145 (2014).