Sulawesi cave painting dated to at least 51,200 years old is the world's oldest known figurative art, pushing the origin of representational imagery back 5,000 years

Summary

A pig-and-human figurative scene painted on the wall of Leang Karampuang cave in the Maros-Pangkep karst region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia was dated by uranium-series analysis to at least 51,200 years before present, making it the world's oldest known figurative artwork. The finding was reported in Nature in July 2024 by a team led by Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm and Indonesian archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana. The scene depicts three human-like figures (therianthropes) interacting with a Sulawesi warty pig, interpreted as the earliest confirmed narrative scene in the archaeological record. The minimum date of 51,200 years ago exceeds the previously oldest known figurative art, a pig image from the same Sulawesi region, which was dated to 45,500 years BP, and substantially predates the oldest known European cave art at approximately 36,000-40,000 years old (Chauvet Cave, France).

The split

The finding reinforced an accumulating body of evidence that southeast Asia, not Europe, was the primary locus of early figurative art development, with earlier Sulawesi discoveries dating back to 2014 having already shifted the field's understanding. Archaeologists in the Chauvet/Lascaux European tradition acknowledged the Southeast Asian priority but noted that European cave art shows greater technical sophistication and diversity in the same 35,000-40,000 BP window, suggesting parallel and possibly independent development of figurative traditions. Indonesian researchers and the Indonesian government emphasised the national significance of the Sulawesi karst heritage and called for UNESCO World Heritage expansion to include more of the Maros-Pangkep cave system's 300+ painted sites.

By the numbers

• 51,200 years: minimum age of Leang Karampuang figurative scene (uranium-series dating)
• 3: human-like figures (therianthropes) in the scene interacting with one Sulawesi warty pig
• 45,500 years: previous oldest known figurative art (also Sulawesi, also pig, reported 2021)
• ~40,000 years: age of Chauvet Cave paintings, France (oldest major European figurative art)
• 300+: cave sites with painted imagery in the Maros-Pangkep region of Sulawesi

Why it matters

The Sulawesi Rock Cave Art finds transform the understanding of when and where the fully modern human cognitive capacity for symbolic narrative emerged. The 51,200-year date places figurative storytelling art at the moment of maximum modern human dispersal out of Africa and through Southeast Asia, suggesting that the cognitive capacity for representational imagery was carried by modern humans out of Africa rather than evolving independently in Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic. This has implications for theories of language, ritual, social organisation, and cultural transmission among the earliest fully modern human populations. The Maros-Pangkep karst system contains hundreds of undated sites that may yield even older examples.

What to watch

• Whether uranium-series imaging of other Maros-Pangkep sites yields older figurative examples
• Whether fieldwork in the Philippines, Borneo, New Guinea, or Australia, all traversed by the same dispersing populations, reveals comparable or earlier figurative art
• UNESCO's response to Indonesian requests to extend World Heritage protection to the wider Maros-Pangkep cave network
• Progress on climate-controlled conservation at the Sulawesi cave sites, which are vulnerable to rising humidity and speleothem growth obscuring the art