Deep inside a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists have found the oldest narrative scene ever painted by humans. It shows a wild pig standing in front of three small human-like figures. Using a special dating method, researchers worked out that it was painted at least 51,200 years ago.
That is older than any other known piece of storytelling art on Earth - older than the famous cave paintings in France and Spain by thousands of years. It was made long before the wheel, before farming and before writing. Whoever painted it lived during the Ice Age, when much of the planet looked very different.
The figures may be hunters chasing the pig, or they could be people from a story we’ll never know. They were drawn with a dark red pigment made from ground-up minerals. The painting tells us something amazing - that humans were already imagining stories and squishing colored mud onto walls to share them, more than 50,000 years ago.
