World's earliest animal painting uncovered - 25th January 2021

A life-sized picture of a wild pig has been identified as the world's most ancient example of figurative art after it was chanced upon in the Leang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Measuring 136cm wide by 54cm high, the hog is thought to have been sketched 45,500 years ago using a dark red ochre pigment. The boar sports a pair of horn-like facial warts characteristic of adult males of the species. Two handprints decorate the space above its hindquarters. Seemingly part of a larger narrative scene, the swine is observing two other warty pigs which, unfortunately, have mostly succumbed to the elements over the millennia.

Maxime Aubert, co-author of a paper on the artwork published in Science Advances journal, explained the ancient artists' methods were not dissimilar to those employed by today's painters. "The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked."

Aubert established the age of the warty pig via analysis of a calcite deposit located on top of the painting. With Uranium-series isotope dating revealing the deposit to be 45,500 years old, the fresco is at least that age “but it could be much older because the dating that we’re using only dates the calcite on top of it”, he added.

The mural may also provide researchers with biological data. To make the handprints, the artists would have had to have placed their hands on the surface before spitting pigment over it. The team hopes to be able to extract DNA samples from residual saliva as well.

While the Sulawesi boar may now hold the record for the world's earliest known representation of a living form in art, the 2018 South African discovery of a hashtag-esque drawing, doodled 73,000 years ago, proves humans have had an artistic streak stretching back into prehistory.