World's earliest figurative and narrative cave art on Sulawesi
- Date
- c. 51,000 – 45,500 years ago
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Sulawesi (Indonesia)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
The limestone caves of the Maros-Pangkep karst on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi preserve what are currently the oldest known figurative paintings and narrative scenes in the world.
A naturalistic depiction of a Sulawesi warty pig at Leang Tedongnge has a minimum uranium-series age of about 45,500 years, making it the earliest securely dated representational image of an animal. At nearby Leang Bulu' Sipong 4 and Leang Karampuang, panels show therianthropes — part-human, part-animal figures — apparently hunting wild pigs and dwarf buffalo; reanalysis in 2024 dated one such scene to at least 48,000 and another to roughly 51,200 years ago, the earliest known storytelling art. These finds demonstrate that the cognitive capacity for symbolic and narrative thought was fully developed among the first modern humans to reach Wallacea, tens of millennia before comparable imagery appears in European cave art. The discoveries have pushed the documented origins of complex symbolic culture decisively into Southeast Asia and reshaped debates about where and when 'behavioural modernity' became visible in the archaeological record.
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Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersalc. 70,000–50,000 years ago
- Göbekli Tepe – monumental architecture by hunter-gatherersc. 9,600–8,000 BCE
- Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic explosionc. 40,000+ years ago
- Chauvet Cave: early masterworks of figurative cave artc. 36,500 years ago
- Earliest Indus Script Signs Appear at Harappac. 3300 BCE
- Earliest musical instruments: Ice Age bone flutesc. 43,000–40,000 years ago
Further reading
The wider story
The Story of Art
The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.
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