The Art of Storytelling

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The ability to tell stories is a defining feature of the human species and one that goes back more than 50,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Archeologists recently discovered a cave painting on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island dating back at least 51,200 years, making it the oldest example of visual storytelling.

“Our results are very surprising: none of the famous European Ice Age art is anywhere near as old as this, with the exception of some controversial finds in Spain, and this is the first time rock art dates in Indonesia have ever been pushed beyond the 50,000-year mark,” lead author and rock specialist Adhi Agus Oktaviana said in a press release.

The painting is located in the limestone cave of Leang Karampuang and was first discovered in 2017. It depicts a red-pigmented pig with its mouth open, and three human-like figures – one with extended arms and no legs holding a rod-like object, another with a stick-like object near the pig’s throat, and a third upside down reaching toward the pig’s head.

The researchers used a novel technique called laser ablation U-series (LA-U-series) analysis to date tiny layers of calcium carbonate on the painting, achieving greater accuracy and resolution in determining the rock art’s age.

The dating method also allowed them to review the age of another cave painting in Sulawesi, which showed that it was around 48,000 years old, instead of 44,000 years old as had been hitherto calculated.

Co-author Maxime Aubert, who helped develop the LA-U-series analysis, said the new method “will revolutionize rock art dating.”

But aside from advancing research techniques, the study shows that storytelling and human abstract thinking evolved much earlier than previously thought.

The earliest evidence of humans creating images comes from geometric patterns found in southern Africa from around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

Researchers are uncertain if depicting figures in images arose later in Africa or elsewhere after humans dispersed from the continent.

Because storytelling is a crucial aspect of human evolution, the findings challenge the long-held view that early figurative art consisted solely of single figures and that narrative scenes appeared later in European art.

“Humans have probably been telling stories for much longer than 51,200 years, but as words do not fossilize we can only go by indirect proxies like depictions of scenes in art – and the Sulawesi art is now the oldest such evidence by far that is known to archaeology,” Oktaviana said.