Dreamlike pig-hunting scene from a cave in Indonesia is the world’s oldest figurative art over 50,000 years ago

Amazing stuff! New method pushes back the date by more than 6,000 years.

Why Indonesia?

"More than 50,000 years ago, people living in lush valleys on the island of Sulawesi climbed up to cramped limestone caves high above their dwelling places. There, they painted fantastical scenes inspired by their lives—half-human, half-animal figures hunting pigs in hues of purple and red. ...
The new dates also come 15,000 years before people painted animals on the walls of famous European caves. ...
By dating infinitesimal amounts of uranium in the mineral layer formed just above the pigment, the authors show the Leang Karampuang cave artwork is at least 51,200 years old, painted not long after people expanded east out of Africa into Asia and the island chains of Oceania. ..."

From the abstract:

"Previous dating research indicated that the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is host to some of the oldest known rock art. That work was based on solution uranium-series (U-series) analysis of calcite deposits overlying rock art in the limestone caves of Maros-Pangkep, South Sulawesi. Here we use a novel application of this approach—laser-ablation U-series imaging—to re-date some of the earliest cave art in this karst area and to determine the age of stylistically similar motifs at other Maros-Pangkep sites. This method provides enhanced spatial accuracy, resulting in older minimum ages for previously dated art. We show that a hunting scene from Leang Bulu’ Sipong, which was originally dated using the previous approach to a minimum of 43,900 thousand years ago (ka), has a minimum age of 50.2 ± 2.2 ka, and so is at least 4,040 years older than thought. Using the imaging approach, we also assign a minimum age of 53.5 ± 2.3 ka to a newly described cave art scene at Leang Karampuang. Painted at least 51,200 years ago, this narrative composition, which depicts human-like figures interacting with a pig, is now the earliest known surviving example of representational art, and visual storytelling, in the world. Our findings show that figurative portrayals of anthropomorphic figures and animals have a deeper origin in the history of modern human (Homo sapiens) image-making than recognized to date, as does their representation in composed scenes."

Dreamlike pig-hunting scene is the world’s oldest figurative art | Science | AAAS 50,000 years ago, artists painted animal-human hybrids on the hunt on an Indonesian cave wall

Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago (open access)

This cave painting in Indonesia dates back more than 50,000 years, making it the oldest known figurative art

Fig. 1: Map of the study area.

Fig. 3: Dated rock art panel at Leang Karampuang.