Warty Pig Is The 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 in length,

00:21and it has the outline of two human handprints by its rump. Here's a brighter image of it,

00:26created with the computer program called decoloration stretch or destretch,

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

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

00:41these warty pigs? It turns out that these wild animals, known as Sulawasi warty pigs, are native

00:48to the island of Sulawasi, and they were hunted by the ancient people who lived here and were even

00:53domesticated by 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 Sulawasi almost seem to

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

01:09importance, according to Adam Bram, the study's lead researcher and an archaeologist at the Australian

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

01:19in limestone caves, the scientists figured out how old they were using uranium series dating.

01:25Basically, when rainwater seeps through a limestone cave, a tiny bit of uranium from the environment

01:32dissolves in the water. Over time, this dripping forms a mineral known as calcite that grows on the cave

01:38walls. That's exactly what happened here. Some calcite with the radioactive element uranium grew over

01:45part of the cave art, so the scientists chipped away a few samples of calcite and measured the

01:49radioactive decay. Essentially, uranium decays into thorium, so they measured the ratio of uranium to

01:56thorium in each sample. In the end, they determined that the pig painting was at least 45,500 years old.

02:02However, outside researchers noted there were a few technical difficulties of the uranium-thorium dating

02:08in the study, so the date is more of a rough estimate than an exact date. But given that there's a lot of

02:13other rock art in Indonesia and on Sulawesi Island, including a warty pig drawing in another cave that's

02:19at least 43,900 years old, the new study provides more evidence that Indonesia was an early hotspot for rock art.