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. It measures four and a half feet or 136 centimeters

00:20 in length and it has the outline of two human handprints by its rump. Here's a brighter image

00:26 of it created with the computer program called decoloration stretch or destretch which is often

00:30 used to study and digitally enhance rock art. The entire panel shows this large pig facing two or

00:36 three other pigs and they're having some kind of social interaction. What's with all these warty

00:41 pigs? 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. It seems clear that early humans interacted closely with this pig on various

00:59 levels for a very long period of time. In fact the ice age artists of Sulawesi almost seem to

01:05 have been obsessed with these warty pigs which is perhaps not surprising given their economic

01:09 importance according to Adam Brown, the study's lead researcher and an archaeologist at the

01:14 Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University. After finding these warty

01:19 pig drawings in limestone caves the scientists figured out how old they were using uranium

01:24 series dating. Basically when rainwater seeps through a limestone cave a tiny bit of uranium

01:31 from the environment dissolves in the water. Over time this dripping forms a mineral known as

01:36 calcite that grows on the cave walls. That's exactly what happened here. Some calcite with

01:42 the radioactive element uranium grew over part of the cave art so the scientists chipped away a few

01:47 samples of calcite and measured the radioactive decay. Essentially uranium decays into thorium

01:54 so they measure the ratio of uranium to thorium in each sample. In the end they determined that

01:59 the pig painting was at least 45,500 years old. However outside researchers noted there were a few

02:05 technical difficulties with the uranium thorium dating in the study so the date is more of a rough

02:10 estimate than an exact date. But given that there's a lot of other rock art in Indonesia and on

02:15 Sulawesi island including a warty pig drawing in another cave that's at least 43,900 years old

02:22 the new study provides more evidence that Indonesia was an early hot spot for rock art.

02:28 [Music]