A pig, three figures and a minimum age
In a limestone cave called Leang Karampuang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a red painting shows a large wild pig with three small human-like figures near it. In 2024 a team led by Adhi Agus Oktaviana and Maxime Aubert reported that the scene is at least 51,200 years old. Their central estimate for the minimum age was 53.5 thousand years, give or take 2.3 thousand. If the date holds, the authors describe it as the oldest known surviving example of visual storytelling.
The word “currently” carries real weight, and so does “minimum”. The team did not date the paint. They dated thin mineral layers that formed on top of it, using the decay of uranium to thorium, and a laser to sample the layers closest to the pigment. Because the mineral could have started forming long after the painting, the true age may be older, but not younger. The researchers also re-dated a hunting scene in another Sulawesi cave, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, from about 43,900 years to about 50,200. Nobody knows what the Karampuang scene means: a real hunt, a myth, or something else.
Oldest surviving is not the same as first
This is the first thing to keep in mind about any “oldest art” headline. The record counts only what survived, could be found and can be dated. Painted surfaces in open air, bark, wood, skin and the body itself rarely last, so every list of “earliest art” is a list of lucky survivals in places that favour preservation, mostly caves and rock shelters. That may over-represent regions with limestone and under-represent those without it.
- Find a stable surface. Check that paint, and the mineral layer above or below it, have not been disturbed.
- Sample the crust, not the art. Tiny amounts of calcite are taken, by drill or laser, from the layer that grew on top of the paint.
- Measure the clock. Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so their ratio indicates how long the crust has been forming; radiocarbon is used instead when charcoal pigment survives.
- Read the result as a limit. A crust over the paint gives a minimum age for the painting.
- Test it again. Other teams re-sample, compare methods and sometimes disagree.
Europe: a long, argued-over story
Many people think of cave art as French. Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche holds more than a thousand images, including mammoths, cave lions, rhinos and bears. UNESCO reports radiocarbon dates of roughly 30,000 to 32,000 years ago, and notes that a rockfall sealed the cave about 20,000 years ago, which helped keep it in remarkable condition until its rediscovery in 1994. Lascaux, whose paintings were discovered in 1940, is much younger: the Metropolitan Museum dates it to around 15,000 BCE. Threats to the paintings led to its closure to the public in 1963; today visitors see a replica in Montignac.
In 2018 a team led by Dirk Hoffmann dated mineral crusts over red marks in three Spanish caves: a ladder-like sign at La Pasiega, a hand stencil at Maltravieso and painted stalagmite curtains at Ardales. The minimum ages ran from about 64,800 to 66,700 years, earlier than most estimates for the arrival of modern humans in Europe. The authors argued that Neanderthals must have made them. This was both exciting and heavily debated. Specialists have questioned whether the crusts and paint are linked in the way the authors need, and the species attribution is an inference from timing, not direct evidence of who held the brush. The authors themselves caution that another well-known site, a red disc at El Castillo, could be attributed to either Neanderthals or early modern humans.
Why did people make it?
The honest answer is that we do not know. Proposed explanations include ritual or ceremony, teaching or storytelling, marking territory or identity, and play. The Metropolitan Museum’s account of Lascaux points out that animals were often painted over earlier images, which hints that the act of depicting may have mattered more than the finished picture. All such readings depend on interpreting minds that left no words. It is also worth avoiding an old frame: that these artists were “primitive” and later ones “advanced”. The Chauvet animals show confident shading and a feel for movement, and they were made tens of thousands of years ago.
From pigments to pixels
The same questions arise when we move to digital creation, in which people now build images, music and whole interactive worlds out of code. Computer-made music goes back at least to 1957, when Max Mathews at Bell Labs demonstrated a program called MUSIC. Today millions of people draw, compose, mod games and share worlds online. Is that the “same urge” as a Sulawesi painter’s? We can say that humans across time and place have made symbolic things that were not necessary for survival, and that tools shape what is possible. Beyond that, motives remain open. A prehistoric hand stencil and a digital avatar may share something, or only look alike to us. Our related article on why humans tell stories explores one thread that might connect them.
