What was the first “art”? How would we know?

Abstract

Archaeologist Adam Brumm recalls the moment in late 2017 when his phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message that included a rather astounding image: three little pigs leaping across the limestone walls of Leang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It was a few months after the field season, and Brumm sat in his office at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His field team had remained in Indonesia. Their notes to him that afternoon were nonchalant, Brumm recalls, along the lines of “Oh by the way, we found this spectacular cave painting.” He was quickly scrolling through the messages on his iPhone, when he saw the first images of the pigs flash by on his screen. “I nearly had a heart attack,” Brumm says. “They were absolutely incredible. I replied, at 3:58 pm: ‘Holy hell!!!!! Amazing pig paintings!!!’” At least 45,500 years ago, a human hand had painted the pigs in ochre, making them the oldest known examples of figurative art by at least several thousand years—and, by some standards, the oldest artwork in the world (1). Researchers believe this 45,500-year-old Indonesian cave painting, apparently of a pig, is the oldest known depiction of the animal world. It’s among several recently unearthed prehistoric images that are shedding new light on the dawn of art. Image credit: Maxime Aubert (Griffith University, Nathan QLD, Australia). But which painting, drawing, or carving deserves the superlative “oldest” is debatable. The moniker depends, in part, on how archaeologists define art itself. The Sulawesi pigs are certainly the oldest known figurative, or representational, art. That entails work depicting objects from life, Brumm explains, such that an average observer would glance at the paintings and recognize them as pigs rather than abstractions. Representational art is common in art history, from Greek Hellenistic marble goddesses to …