The Oldest Known Cave Paintings Are Over 45,000 Years Old

While the famous caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in Europe often dominate discussions of prehistoric art, the story of humanity's earliest artistic expressions begins much further east. In the limestone caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia, a vibrant, life-sized depiction of a native warty pig reveals a surprisingly ancient creative impulse. This painting, rendered in red ochre pigment, is not a simple abstract design but a clear representation of an animal that roamed the landscape. Its discovery radically shifted our understanding of where and when humans began to create figurative art, demonstrating that this cognitive leap occurred thousands of years earlier and in a different part of the world than previously documented.

The incredible age of the painting was determined through a clever scientific method. Instead of dating the pigment, which can be unreliable, scientists used uranium-series dating on the mineral deposits, or "cave popcorn," that had formed over the artwork. This technique measures the decay of uranium in the calcite, providing a minimum age for the painting underneath. The finding challenges the long-held view that sophisticated art originated solely in Europe, suggesting instead that the capacity for storytelling and symbolic representation was a fundamental trait carried by modern humans as they migrated out of Africa and across the globe. The Sulawesi pig is not just a picture; it is a profound link to the complex inner lives of our distant ancestors.