Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago

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.

Concerning the latter, of the three oldest dated cave art panels now known from Sulawesi, Leang Karampuang (minimum age, 51.2 ka), Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (minimum age, 48 ka) and Leang Tedongnge (minimum age, 45.5 ka) all involve figures that are grouped together in such a way as to allow an observer to infer actions taking place among them. It is possible that the Leang Tedongnge art is older; however, we were unable to redate it using the new approach, as there was no calcium carbonate material remaining (the previous method involved the use of the entire sample). Two panels seem to comprise pictorial representations of human–animal relationships (Leang Karampuang and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4), while the third depicts animals (S. celebensis) that are apparently interacting with each other. Moreover, the panel at Leang Timpuseng (minimum age, 35.3 ka) portrays a pig standing on a painted line representing the land surface, another convention used in scenic depiction. The use of composed scenes in cave art may have enhanced the communicative potential of this visual medium. In contrast to single-figure depictions, the agency of the juxtaposed figures constituting a narrative scene allows a story to be told through images in a manner that does not require the producer of the art to be present to convey the narrative to an audience. Scene-making has therefore been linked to an increase in the potential for images that persisted on rock surfaces to transmit particular narratives (such as myths) over long periods of time, especially when combined with oral traditions. On the basis of our dating work, it now seems that depictions of anthropomorphic figures (including therianthropes) interacting with animals appear in the Late Pleistocene cave art of Sulawesi at a frequency not seen elsewhere until tens of millennia later in Europe. This implies that a rich culture of storytelling developed at an early period in the long history of H. sapiens in this region — in particular, the use of scenic representation to tell visual stories about human–animal relationships.