Humanity has an innate need to tell stories, something experts believe was a way to pass down information critical for survival. Now, experts say this might be the first one ever written down.
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00:00Humanity has an innate need to tell stories, something experts believe was a way to pass
00:08down information critical for survival.
00:11Now experts say this might be the first one ever written down.
00:15It's a painting that was discovered on a cave wall in what is now Indonesia, and it dates
00:19back some 51,200 years.
00:23They say it shows human-like figures on a pig hunt, and it exceeds the previously oldest
00:27cave art by millennia.
00:29The phrasing of human-like is incredibly important here, as these paintings were made
00:32when Neanderthals were still around, meaning experts can't be sure just yet whether early
00:37humans or our late ancestors created them.
00:40The previously oldest cave art was also discovered in Indonesia, that one dating back to around
00:4548,000 years ago, meaning this newly discovered one was made more than 3,000 years before
00:50that one, with the researchers writing that similar depictions of human-like figures and
00:54animals, especially those appearing to depict a story, weren't seen in this frequency until
00:59tens of thousands of years later in Europe.