00:00The oldest rock art of an animal on record is a very hairy and warty pig
00:04found in an Indonesian cave that dates back to 45,500 years ago.
00:13The pig itself is actually quite large. It measures four and a half feet or 136 centimeters in length,
00:20and 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.
00:33The entire panel shows this large pig facing two or three other pigs,
00:37and they're having some kind of social interaction. What's with all these warty pigs?
00:42It turns out that these wild animals, known as Sulawasi warty pigs, are native to the island of
00:49Sulawasi, and they were hunted by the ancient people who lived here and were even domesticated by them.
00:55It seems clear that early humans interacted closely with this pig on various levels for a
01:00very long period of time. In fact, the Ice Age artists of Sulawasi almost seem to have been
01:05obsessed with these warty pigs, which is perhaps not surprising given their economic importance,
01:10according to Adam Bram, the study's lead researcher and an archaeologist at the Australian Research
01:15Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University. After finding these warty pig drawings in limestone
01:20caves, the scientists figured out how old they were using uranium series dating. Basically,
01:26when rainwater seeps through a limestone cave, a tiny bit of uranium from the environment dissolves in
01:32the water. Over time, this dripping forms a mineral known as calcite that grows on the cave walls.
01:39That'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
01:55to thorium in each sample. In the end, they determined that the pig painting was at least 45,500 years
02:02old.
02:02However, outside researchers noted there were a few technical difficulties of the uranium-thorium
02:07dating in the study, so the date is more of a rough estimate than an exact date. But given that
02:13there's
02:13a lot of other rock art in Indonesia and on Sulawesi Island, including a warty pig drawing in another cave
02:19that's at least 43,900 years old, the new study provides more evidence that Indonesia was an early
02:26hot spot for rock art.
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