The entrance to the cave, located high above the ground, is difficult to access ( 2). Cave painting was discovered by archaeologists at a site called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi ( 1). It would also beat the 39,000- to 40,000-year-old Löwenmensch (“lion man”) figurine from Germany, which has long held pride of place as the earliest therianthrope, as well as a 17,000-year-old hunting scene from France’s famed Lascaux Cave. If the painting is at least 43,900 years old, as Aubert and his colleagues argue, it would best the previous record holder for oldest figurative artwork-a 40,000-year-old painting of a cowlike animal found in a cave in Borneo-by several thousand years. Sampling deposits from various parts of the scene, the team obtained minimum dates ranging from 43,900 to 35,100 years ago. To date the images, the researchers measured the radioactive decay of uranium in mineral deposits that had formed atop them. The researchers suggest that the various figures-all rendered in a pigment with the color of old rust-are part of the same scene and that it may show a communal hunting strategy known as a game drive, in which prey are flushed from cover and driven toward hunters.
Such human-animal hybrids are called therianthropes (derived from the Greek words for “beast” and “human”), and they are considered to be indicators of spiritual thinking-the bull-headed minotaur of Greek mythology, for example, and the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis. The hunters appear humanlike but exhibit mysterious animal traits-one possesses a tail, for instance, and another has a beak. Nearby, other hunters set on more buffaloes, as well as pigs. On the cave’s craggy wall, six tiny hunters confront a large buffalo, brandishing ropes or spears. The team discovered the ancient painting in 2017 in a cave known as Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 in southern Sulawesi’s karst region of Maros-Pangkep, a dramatic landscape of jutting limestone towers and cliffs. If they are right, the find could also constitute the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and supernatural thinking in the world. In a paper published in December in Nature, Maxime Aubert, Adhi Agus Oktaviana and Adam Brumm, all at Griffith University in Australia, and their colleagues report that the art-a cave painting-appears to show several fantastical human figures hunting real-life animals.
Now archaeologists working on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia have found the oldest figurative art to date. But in recent years researchers have uncovered older instances of figurative art in Southeast Asia. For a long time the oldest examples of figurative art (as opposed to abstract mark making) and depictions of fictitious creatures all came from sites in Europe dated to less than 40,000 years ago. Vanishingly few people attain such mastery of visual storytelling, of course, but even in its lesser forms, such creative expression is special: only our species, Homo sapiens, is known to invent fictional tales and convey them through representational imagery.Īrchaeologists have eagerly sought the origins of our distinctive artistic behavior. It is one of the great narrative artworks of all time. Critics have interpreted Goya’s rendition-the cannibal god shown wide-eyed with apparent horror, shame and madness as he devours his son-as an allegory of the ravages of war, the decay of Spanish society, the artist’s declining psychological state. In Room 67 of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Francisco Goya’s Saturn enthralls viewers with a scene of abomination.The painting depicts the Greek myth of Cronus (Saturn in the Roman version), who ate his children for fear of being overthrown by them.