Oldest story told adorns Indonesian cave wall
WASHINGTON — Archaeologists working in Indonesia say they have discovered the earliest artwork that depicts a story. It is a tale told in red pigment on a cave wall. The scene, in the scientists’ interpretation, shows supernatural people hunting wild animals.
People living on the island of Sulawesi drew this image of pigs and horned animals as long as 44,000 years ago, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Surrounding the animals are people or humanlike figures.
This artwork predates the charcoal cave art in Europe by thousands of years.
Ancient Sulawesi people, like European cave painters, drew lots of wildlife. On the limestone walls, animals loom larger than the other characters, who are nearly as spindly as stick figures. In one section, those figures cluster in front of a buffalo. They appear to face off against the animal. Lines connect their small arms to the buffalo’s chest.
“It’s quite amazing. It’s a narrative scene, and it’s the first time we see that in the rock art,” said study author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia. “Everything,” he said, meaning narration and creative invention, “is there from the beginning.”
The large horned animals scrawled on the walls are anoa, a species of water buffalo found only on Sulawesi. Anoa are about the size of large dogs, but what they lack in stature they make up for in aggressive tempers. The characters in the scene appear to be hunting or, perhaps, wrangling one of the buffalo, Aubert said.
Study author Adam Brumm first saw the artwork as blurry photos in a messaging app. “I was just screaming with excitement when these images ended up in my phone,” said Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University.