Archaeologists Have Discovered the Oldest Figurative Cave Painting in the World—by Far—in a Totally Unexpected Place

A newly discovered cave painting on the central Indonesian
island of Sulawesi is likely to shift the timeline of art history
and reconfigure our understanding of the earliest visual art.

A painted panel dating back at least 43,900 years, discovered
accidentally by Indonesian archaeologist Pak Hamrullah in 2017,
shows eight figures with weapons in hand approaching wild pigs and
small native buffaloes. Some of the figures are portrayed with a
combination of human and animal characteristics (one has a beak,
another has a tail), defined by archaeologists as
therianthropes.

“The hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest
pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative
artwork in the world,” according to a scientific paper published
this week in Nature.

The work likely portrays either a hunting scene or a shamanic
ritual, but the actual significance of the panel remains a mystery.
What researchers can deduce, however, is that this artwork shifts
our understanding of when—and where—humans started depicting
imaginary figures not drawn directly from life.

The Sulawesi painting predates a lion-headed figurine previously
thought to be the world’s oldest therianthrope by 4,000 years, and
is 20,000 years older than the birdman figure found in the hunting
scene in the French Lascaux caves.

“Our findings therefore further suggest that the first known
indication of religious-like thinking—the ability to conceive of
non-real entities such as therianthropes—comes not from Europe as
has long been assumed, but occurs at least 4.9 [thousand years ago] in Sulawesi,” the study notes.

Adam Brumm, one of the study’s authors and an archaeologist at
Griffith University in Australia, told the New York Times that his team was
“completely blown away” by the find.

“We had never seen anything even remotely like this before in
the hundreds of cave art sites we’d documented [on Sulawesi].”

The post Archaeologists Have Discovered the Oldest
Figurative Cave Painting in the World—by Far—in a Totally
Unexpected Place appeared first on artnet News.