The cave art of Sulawesi

The story

A red pig on a rock wall

The island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, is shaped like a crooked K. In its southern part, near the city of Makassar, there is a region of limestone hills full of caves, called Maros-Pangkep. For decades archaeologists have known that its walls are covered with images of hands and animals. In December 2017, during an exploration, an Indonesian archaeologist, Basran Burhan, entered a cave called Leang Tedongnge, at the end of a valley enclosed between very steep walls, and saw on one wall a red figure, almost completely hidden by time: a pig. It was over a metre and thirty centimetres long and more than fifty centimetres high.

The pig shown is a Sulawesi warty pig, an animal that still lives on the island today, recognisable by the warty lumps on its muzzle. The drawing is made with a dark red pigment, a colour obtained from ochre. Behind the body there are the outlines of two hands, made by placing the hand on the rock and blowing the colour around it. They are the “stamp” of whoever painted, or of someone who wanted to leave a mark.

How to measure the age of a painting

A drawing on rock cannot be dated with radiocarbon, because the red of ochre contains no carbon of organic origin. The researchers used another method, based on uranium. In caves, water dripping down the walls slowly deposits a crust of calcite, which sometimes also covers paintings. Calcite contains traces of uranium, which over time turns into another element, thorium, at a known rate. By measuring the amount of uranium and thorium, you can tell how long ago the crust formed. If the crust lies on top of the drawing, the drawing is older than the crust.

So in 2021 the team led by the Australian archaeologist Adam Brumm, of Griffith University, with his colleague Maxime Aubert and the Indonesian Adhi Agus Oktaviana, established that the pig of Leang Tedongnge is at least 45,500 years old. “At least” because the crust is younger than the drawing: the pig may be much older, and nobody knows by how much. The result was published in the journal Science Advances.

A story told

In 2024 the same team dated another scene, in a cave called Leang Karampuang. It shows three figures with a somewhat human look standing near a pig. The calcite crust that covers it indicates an age of at least 51,200 years. For scholars it is the oldest known narrative scene: not a single figure, but a group of characters who seem to be doing something together. It is hard to say what story it was, because the painting is in bad condition and can be interpreted in different ways. But it seems to want to tell of an event.

Other images in the region are more recent, but still very ancient: a painted hand in Leang Timpuseng cave is about 40,000 years old; on the walls there are also many figures of small wild cattle, the anoa. These places are still little explored and could hold more surprises.

Art was not born in Europe

For more than a century it was thought that art had begun in Europe. The reason is simple: the first painted cave discovered, Altamira in Spain, in 1879, and French caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet attracted scholars, and digging in Europe has gone on for longer. But the oldest datings come more and more often from other parts of the world. In Spain, some red discs and hands have been dated with the same method to more than 40,000 years, while in South Africa, in Blombos Cave, a piece of ochre with crossed lines engraved on it is about 73,000 years old. On a wall in Borneo, in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, there is a figure of a bovine about 40,000 years old.

The picture that emerges is of an ability that belongs to our species and that appeared in several places, perhaps very early, perhaps already in Africa before the great migration. We know that the first paintings are not necessarily the simplest: the pig of Sulawesi is realistic and detailed.

Why paint a pig? We do not know. It may have been a sign of belonging, hunting magic, a story for children, a tribute to an important animal. The silence of the paintings reminds us that not everything ancient can be explained.