In December 2017, a team of researchers led by Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert of Griffith University, working with Indonesian archaeologists, climbed into a remote limestone cave called Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The cave is in a hidden valley in the Maros-Pangkep karst. On the wall of the cave, painted in red ochre, was a figurative image of a Sulawesi warty pig, a wild boar species native to the island. In January 2021, when the team published their dating analysis in Science Advances, the painting was found to be at least 45,500 years old.
This number is doing a great deal of work that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, fully absorbed.
The number is older than any previously known figurative cave painting in the world. The number is older than the famous European cave paintings at Chauvet and Lascaux by approximately fifteen thousand years. The number is older than the human migration into Europe by roughly five thousand years. The number is, by every available archaeological measure, pushing the timeline of recognizably modern symbolic thought back into a period that the standard textbook narratives, until very recently, had not been allocating to it.
What the paintings actually contain
The Leang Tedongnge pig is the headline find from the 2021 paper. The wider Sulawesi cave-painting record, on close examination, contains considerably more than a single pig. The same team and its successors have, in the years since 2017, dated and documented a network of cave paintings across the Maros-Pangkep karst, including images that the field considers structurally more significant than the pig itself.
The most consequential of these is a painting at a nearby cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which shows a narrative scene of several human-animal hybrid figures, or therianthropes, hunting wild pigs and dwarf buffalo. The Griffith University team initially dated this painting to at least 44,000 years old. A more recent analysis published in 2024, using a refined laser ablation uranium-series dating technique, revised the date to at least 48,000 years old. A separate painting at a third cave called Leang Karampuang, also depicting three therianthropes interacting with a wild pig, has been dated to at least 51,200 years old, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art image in the world and the earliest known narrative art anywhere.
The structural feature of these paintings that has, on close examination, produced the most significant rewriting of the wider scholarly consensus is not the pigs. The pigs, while remarkable, are figurative representations of animals, and the wider field had already accepted that figurative animal art was within the capabilities of humans of the relevant period. The structural feature that has actually shifted the consensus is the therianthropes. The therianthropes are human-animal hybrid figures. The hybrid figures are not representations of anything that exists in the natural world. The hybrid figures are, by every available interpretation, products of the painter’s imagination.
Why the therianthropes matter
It is worth being precise about what the therianthropes are doing, structurally, in the archaeological record, because the wider cultural register has not yet developed particularly good vocabulary for it.
A figurative animal painting demonstrates that the painter can observe an animal and reproduce its visual features in pigment on a wall. The demonstration requires substantial cognitive capability. The demonstration does not require, however, the ability to imagine something that does not exist. A representational painting can, in principle, be produced by a mind that is operating entirely in the register of accurate observation of the present world.
A therianthrope is structurally different. A figure that combines human and animal features is, by definition, not something the painter has seen. The figure is, more accurately, the product of imagining a combination of observed features into something that does not exist in the natural world. The producing of such a figure requires the cognitive capacity to hold multiple observed categories in mind simultaneously, to mentally combine them into a new category, and to translate the new category back into a visual representation that another viewer can recognize as the imagined combination.
This capacity is, on every available measure, what cognitive archaeologists have been calling “modern symbolic thought” or “behavioral modernity.” The capacity is what allows humans to think about supernatural beings, hypothetical futures, fictional scenarios, and the various other forms of abstract content that the standard scholarly narratives have treated as the defining features of recognizably modern human cognition. The capacity is also what allows for religion, fiction, planning, and most of the other forms of complex symbolic activity that the wider species has built its cultures on.
The therianthropes at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 and Leang Karampuang are, accordingly, not just unusually old paintings. They are, more specifically, the earliest reliably dated direct evidence of the cognitive capacity for abstract symbolic thought that the field has so far identified.
What the standard narrative had been assuming
The wider textbook narrative about when humans became recognizably modern has, for most of the last several decades, placed the relevant transition somewhere in the period between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, with most of the evidence for it concentrated in European archaeological sites. The narrative has generally treated this transition as a relatively rapid cognitive or cultural revolution, often called the “Upper Paleolithic Revolution” or the “Creative Explosion,” in which the species suddenly acquired the capacities for art, religion, complex tools, and the various other features of recognizably modern behavior.
The Sulawesi findings have been rewriting this narrative in several specific directions. The first direction is geographical. The narrative had been treating Europe as the primary venue of the transition, with the rest of the world following later. The Sulawesi findings demonstrate, on the available evidence, that humans in Indonesia were producing complex symbolic art at least as early as humans in Europe were, and probably earlier. The center of gravity of the transition has, accordingly, been shifting away from a Europe-centered model toward a model in which the relevant cognitive capacities were already present in widely dispersed human populations across multiple continents.
The second direction is temporal. The standard narrative had been treating the transition as relatively sudden, occurring somewhere around 40,000 years ago. The Sulawesi paintings, at 45,500 to 51,200 years old, push the well-documented presence of the relevant capacities back by another five to ten thousand years. The transition is, on the available evidence, looking less and less like a sudden revolution and more and more like the visible tip of a longer process whose earlier stages we have not yet adequately documented.
The third direction, and this is the one that the wider field is currently working out the implications of, is interpretive. The therianthropes at Leang Karampuang are, by the Griffith team’s interpretation, evidence of the cognitive capacity to imagine supernatural beings, which has historically been treated as one of the defining markers of behavioral modernity. The evidence is now 51,200 years old. The implications, on close examination, are that the species was capable of religion, mythology, and the other features of supernatural cognition considerably earlier than the standard narratives had been allowing for.
What is being quietly rewritten
The rewriting is not, on the available evidence, occurring in the form of a single dramatic revision. The rewriting is occurring in the form of textbook chapters being slowly updated, museum exhibits being redesigned, undergraduate syllabi being adjusted, and the wider cultural register continuing, with some delay, to absorb the new dates.
The cultural register has not yet, on the available evidence, fully caught up. The popular image of the earliest cave paintings is still, in most cases, the European one. The Lascaux and Chauvet imagery is still what most people picture when they think about the deep prehistory of human art. The Sulawesi paintings are not yet, in any widespread sense, in the cultural memory of educated readers in the way that the European paintings are. The gap between the current scholarly understanding and the wider cultural absorption is, on close examination, roughly fifteen thousand years long, which is itself an interesting fact about how slowly cultural narratives update relative to the rate of new evidence.
The paintings at Leang Tedongnge, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, and Leang Karampuang are, by every available measure, among the most significant archaeological finds of the last several decades. The findings are quietly rewriting almost every textbook narrative about when humans started being recognizably modern, where the relevant cognitive transitions occurred, and what the structural features of those transitions actually involved. The rewriting is, on the available evidence, still in progress. The wider cultural absorption is, on the same evidence, lagging behind. The paintings will, in time, be as widely recognized as Lascaux and Chauvet currently are. The rewriting is what is, in some real way, currently producing the conditions under which the recognition will eventually occur.
