The oldest known figurative artwork is a 45,500-year-old pig painted in an Indonesian cave
Long before Lascaux, someone in Sulawesi painted a wild pig on a cave wall — and signed it with handprints.
Deep in a limestone cave called Leang Tedongnge, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, archaeologists found a life-size painting of a Sulawesi warty pig rendered in dark-red mineral pigment, or ochre. Using uranium-series dating of the calcite crust that had grown over the image, researchers gave it a minimum age of 45,500 years.
That makes it the oldest known figurative art — an image meant to depict a real thing — predating the celebrated cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in Europe by roughly 20,000 years.
The pig measures about 136 cm across and shares the wall with hand stencils, made by pressing a palm to the rock and spraying pigment around it.
A handprint left beside an animal, tens of millennia ago, is among the earliest signs of people making art to represent their world.
The find shifts the story of human creativity decisively out of Europe and into Southeast Asia.
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