Older Dates for Figurative Art and Storytelling

At Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, our LA-U-series dating work shows that the panel with the figurative art and composed scene is at least several thousand years older than previously established, with a new minimum age of 48 ka. Furthermore, our use of the same method at Leang Karampuang shows that both forms of artistic expression (naturalism and narrative) date to at least 51.2 ka in the Maros-Pangkep karsts. It is evident from these findings that the use of figurative depiction has a particularly deep antiquity in the history of early human visual culture. Presently, the earliest widely accepted evidence for image-making by our species is from Middle Stone Age southern Africa (around 100–75 ka) and comprises geometric motifs (grid-like patterns) incised on small ochre nodules. It is therefore an open question whether the origin of figurative depiction can be traced to an artistic culture that arose in Africa after the emergence of this early tradition of producing non-representational marks, or somewhere outside it after the dispersal of H. sapiens, including in Southeast Asia.

The new Sulawesi dates also challenge two key premises in the study of Pleistocene art, both of which are based on the rich record of artistic production in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (~40–10 ka): first, that the depiction of anthropomorphs or human-like figures did not become relatively common until towards the end of the Late Pleistocene; and second, that the creation of obvious narrative compositions was rare or absent in early cave art generally.