Warty Pig Is Oldest Animal Cave Art

A 45,500-year-old warty pig drawing is the oldest known cave painting of an animal on record. The piggies were painted in Indonesian caves.

Transcript

00:00 The oldest rock art of an animal on record is a very hairy ant warty pig found in an

00:05 Indonesian cave that dates back to 45,500 years ago.

00:09 The pig itself is actually quite large.

00:16 It measures 4.5 feet or 136 centimeters in length and it has the outline of two human

00:23 handprints by its rump.

00:24 Here's a brighter image of it, created with the computer program called decoloration stretch

00:29 or destretch, which is often used to study and digitally enhance rock art.

00:33 The entire panel shows this large pig facing two or three other pigs and they're having

00:38 some kind of social interaction.

00:40 What's with all these warty pigs?

00:42 It turns out that these wild animals known as Sulawesi warty pigs are native to the island

00:48 of Sulawesi and they were hunted by the ancient people who lived here and were even domesticated

00:54 by them.

00:55 It seems clear that early humans interacted closely with this pig on various levels for

00:59 a very long period of time.

01:01 In fact, the ice age artists of Sulawesi almost seem to have been obsessed with these warty

01:06 pigs, which is perhaps not surprising given their economic importance.

01:11 According to Adam Bram, the study's lead researcher and an archaeologist at the Australian Research

01:15 Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University.

01:18 After finding these warty pig drawings in limestone caves, the scientists figured out

01:22 how old they were using uranium series dating.

01:25 Basically, when rainwater seeps through a limestone cave, a tiny bit of uranium from

01:31 the environment dissolves in the water.

01:33 Over time, this dripping forms a mineral known as calcite that grows on the cave walls.

01:39 That's exactly what happened here.

01:41 Some calcite with the radioactive element uranium grew over part of the cave art.

01:46 So the scientists chipped away a few samples of calcite and measured the radioactive decay.

01:51 Usually uranium decays into thorium, so they measured the ratio of uranium to thorium in

01:56 each sample.

01:57 In the end, they determined that the pig painting was at least 45,500 years old.

02:02 However, outside researchers noted there were a few technical difficulties with the uranium/thorium

02:07 dating in the study, so the date is more of a rough estimate than an exact date.

02:12 But given that there's a lot of other rock art in Indonesia and on Sulawesi Island, including

02:17 a warty pig drawing in another cave that's at least 43,900 years old, the new study provides

02:23 more evidence that Indonesia was an early hotspot for rock art.

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