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

00:00The oldest rock art of an animal on record is a very hairy and warty pig,

00:05found in an Indonesian cave that dates back to 45,500 years ago.

00:14The pig itself is actually quite large. It measures four and a half feet or 136 centimeters

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

00:26of it created with the computer program called decoloration stretch or de-stretch, which is

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

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

00:41pigs? It turns out that these wild animals known as Sulawesi warty pigs are native to the island

00:48of Sulawesi and they were hunted by the ancient people who lived here and were even domesticated

00:54by them. It seems clear that early humans interacted closely with this pig on various

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01:37that grows on the cave walls. That's exactly what happened here. Some calcite with the radioactive

01:43element uranium grew over part of the cave art. So the scientists chipped away a few samples of

01:48calcite and measured the radioactive decay. Essentially, uranium decays into thorium, so they

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

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

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

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

02:16island, including a warty pig drawing in another cave that's at least 43,900 years old,

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