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Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03826-4

EXCERPT: . . . A cave-wall depiction of a pig and buffalo hunt is the world’s oldest recorded story, claim archaeologists who discovered the work on the Indonesian island Sulawesi. The scientists say the scene is more than 44,000 years old. [...] Previously, rock art found in European sites dated to around 14,000 to 21,000 years old were considered to be the world’s oldest clearly narrative artworks. The scientists working on the latest find say that the Indonesian art pre-dates these.

[...] Other researchers say the discovery is important because the animal paintings are also the oldest figurative artworks — those that clearly depict objects or figures in the natural world — on record. But some aren’t yet convinced by the claim the panel represents a single ‘scene’, or story. They suggest it might be a series of images painted over the course of perhaps thousands of years. “Whether it’s a scene is questionable,” says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist and rock-art specialist at Durham University, UK.

“They’ve invented everything,” Pablo Picasso is reported to have said after visiting the famed Lascaux Cave, in France’s Dordogne Valley. The site, discovered in 1940, includes hundreds of animal figures painted around 17,000 years ago. An image from the cave, and others from the same period, are widely considered to be the earliest known narrative artworks. In the decades since, archaeologists have discovered even older rock art, dating to around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, including depictions of animals and stylized symbols, in European caves such as Chauvet in France and El Castillo in Spain.

Many researchers assumed that rock art found later in Africa, Australia and Asia was younger than these European works; such artworks are notoriously difficult to date because they can be made with raw materials, such as charcoal, that can be much older than the paintings themselves. But scientists including Brumm jolted the archaeological world when they reported, in 2014 and 2018, that caves in Sulawesi2 and Borneo3 held artworks, including animal paintings, that were older than 40,000 years — of similar age to and perhaps older than those created during the European Ice Age.

[...] The depiction of these animal–human figures, known in mythology as therianthropes, suggests that early humans in Sulawesi had the ability to conceive of things that do not exist in the natural world, say the researchers. “We don’t know what it means, but it seems to be about hunting and it seems to maybe have mythological or supernatural connotations,” says Brumm... (MORE - details)
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