The Ancients - Indonesian Cave Art: A Dramatic New Discovery

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

It’s a paradox for the ages, breaking news about people who lived and died thousands of years ago. This discovery is no different, because Adam Brumm and his team in Sulawesi have released their discovery of the oldest known figurative art made by modern humans. And the oldest known cave art depicting the animal kingdom. The paintings on the Indonesian island are over 45,500 years old, and feature three pigs alongside the stencilled outlines of the hands of their prehistoric painter (perhaps). Listen as Adam tells Tristan about his research on this beautiful island, how the pigs were discovered and what they can tell us about the first humans to arrive in Southeast Asia.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, I'm delighted to say, I'm very excited to say, that we are talking about a groundbreaking new archaeological discovery.

We're going way back. Now, you might have noticed in the news over the past couple of days that archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest cave art, the world's oldest cave art that we know of on Sulawesi in Indonesia. Now, this is an amazing new discovery. And I saw it in the news yesterday morning and thought, right, we've got to get someone on the show pronto to talk about this new discovery. I sent an email out to Adam Brum from Griffith University in Australia, Brisbane, Australia, one of the leading archaeologists behind this new find, one of the leading archaeologists in the team working on the rock art in Sulawesi. And he came back very

quickly saying he would love to come on the show, which was fantastic, because here's the podcast. Here's Adam. Now, this is huge news. This is breaking news. Well, for the Joe blogs like me, this is breaking news. Not for you guys who've been hiding it for so long. You and your team have found, can we say, the oldest figurative cave art that we know of in early 2021 in the world? Yeah, yeah, that we know of. That's the key phrase here.'s the oldest dated this cave painting which we now have dated to at least 45 and a half thousand years ago it's the oldest known dated evidence for representational or figurative art of any kind anywhere in the world as far as we're aware you know as always with these things we don't expect that claim to stand for very long we hope it doesn't stand for

very long i certainly hope it i'll be very disappointed if this turns out to be the oldest art that's ever found the oldest figurative art that would be terrible but yeah at the moment you know to our knowledge this is what we have found this is what we have on our hands so let's talk through going up to the discovery as it were let's set the because Adam, where in the world are we talking about with this new discovery? Well, the new discovery is on an island in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago known as Sulawesi. And in the older literature, this island was called Celebes or the Celebes. And you'll see that if anyone has a familiarity with the early maritime journeys of early European explorers through that region and the history of the spice trade and allago, which of course is the largest maritime nation on earth in Southeast Asia. This is the Republic of Indonesia, one of the largest countries essentially to the very north of Australia.

And Sulawesi itself is a very large island. It's the 11th largest island, in fact, on earth. The total land area of around about 174,000 square kilometres, which is a pretty decent size. And it's a very strangely shaped island. Some people have likened the shape of the island to a lowercase k. Others say it almost looks like a bit of an octopus or octopus shape or has a spidery sort of shape.

It's a peculiar island that seems to have been formed initially by the collision of plate fragments from various continental plates and it's just bizarre. I mean, it's essentially like it has a mountainous core with a whole series of peninsulas or arms radiating out and it's a very strange looking island. So anyway, it's got a long story short. In the southwestern arm of this island

is beautiful limestone tower cast environment known as maros and in maros we have it's about a 450 kilometer square limestone cast region you know incredibly beautiful quite close to the current coastline and only about an hour's drive away from Makassar, which is the capital city of Sulawesi and one of the largest cities in Indonesia. And in the Maros Kast, we've got all these limestone hills and massifs that are just completely riddled from top to bottom and below the ground with networks of caves and rock shelters that were inhabited by these early humans

and in which we find today abundant rock art, including this cave art site that we've now dated to 45,500 years ago, along with numerous other rock art sites that have also yielded evidence for cave paintings going back into the late Pleistocene, the Ice Age. Well, we'll definitely get onto those other discoveries in this amazing part of the island

from what you were saying there. I mean, that's absolutely remarkable how close it is to this huge city. But as you say, then you have this amazing landscape not far away with all this remarkable prehistoric remnants, shall we say. Yeah, look, it's kind of a it's a blessing and a curse in one sense, because it's logistically it's one of the easiest places I've ever had to do field work in, in Indonesia. With my colleague here from Griffith University, Professor Maxime Aubert, our rock art dating specialist, I've done field work with him in Kalimantan, which is the northeastern part of the island of Borneo,

which is just to the west of Sulawesi. And that is seriously remote field work. I mean, it's just nuts how I mean you know getting to these cave art sites requires probably a week of solid trekking with the backpack and through the just in really really rugged mountainous karst terrain trekking through the jungle walking across logs you know that are spanning these rivers that if you fall off you're in serious trouble it's seriously hard going to get up to those cave art sites whereas in Sulawesi and Makassar you know you get straight off the plane you get in a taxi and you're there in an hour and you can just walk

straight from the side of the road across a flat rice field into some of the oldest cave art sites in the world and then come out and have a beer you know so it's bizarre that's the blessing side of it the logistical ease of working in that part of the world and having all of these world-class archaeology and rock art at your fingertips so to speak but the curse part of it is the fact that it is so close to these major urban centers and densely populated village areas which has led to this cast, just from a commercial perspective, the limestone cast in this area is heavily mined by the mineral extraction industries for phosphates, for cement production. Indonesia is, I think, one of the largest consumers of

cement in the world. And this obviously does enormous damage to the cast environment and to the archaeology as well. And also, unfortunately, in some cases, we get lots of graffiti and vandalism of the sites just from just being so close to where modern people live. But I guess that's always the way in archaeology. And I'm sure listeners would have far more horror stories of this sort of thing and the impact it can have on sites. But look, it's an amazing part of the world. It's an amazing part of Indonesia. And to have access to this incredible archaeology and also to be able to do it in relative comfort,

I mean, I can still entertain you with a few stories of scorpion stings and rats and all sorts of horrible things. But look, it's a real experience to be there. And it's probably the only reason we've been able to do so much research and not just do the rock art dating, but also excavate very deep inside some of these caves. One of the only reasons we're able to do this is because it is fairly close to civilization, if you like. Well, let's go away then from the 21st century and these urban centers back to this amazing discovery. How did your team, you and your team team how did you stumble upon this cave painting well this particular one um we've been working in maros over a decade now and it's especially

since 2011 we've been surveying the limestone cast environment every season we're usually there for about two or three months at a stretch each annual field season exploring the area for more rock art sites and local people also know what we're doing and so they will often come to us to our base camp and tell us about oh yeah you know behind our village is a cave with this lukusan as it's called in bahasa indonesia the indonesian language art on the walls so we're always looking for new rock art sites, both formally and informally. And on this one particular field season in 2017, our primary focus was on excavating one of the rock art sites to try to learn as much as we can about the Ice Age artists, cave artists, as much as we

can about their lives from the archaeological deposits themselves, as well as also surveying the region for rock art. And on that season, on one of the days off, I wanted to go for a bit of a walk. So I walked up into a highland valley, which is just behind our base camp. There's a road that goes along. We'd passed through it before, and it's this very beautiful elevated valley. Sorry, I should mention that most of the rock art sites are down on the lowland plains. Okay, so this is a lowland tower cast environment but as you go deep higher up into the cast network you do find these sort of blind cast valleys which are you know what we refer to the highlands possibly they're

not strictly from a geomorphological perspective but that's what they're known as locally there so i went up and explored one of these highlands and through these villages and i could see all of this really interesting cast environment i could see all of this really interesting karst environment and I could see the potential. It had never been explored before by archaeologists and I could see some potential there, but we didn't have time. This is towards the end of the field season. So I ended up organising for my right-hand man, if you like,

an Indonesian archaeologist called Basrang Borhan, and he's now doing his PhD with me at Griffith University in Brisbane but he's one of the best archaeologists I've ever worked with worked with him now for over a decade he hails from the Conjo speaking community of southern Sulawesi which is a an ethnic minority group within the Makassar speaking peoples so he's a knows this area intimately knows the archaeology very well very great guy and i had him after i'd returned to australia organized a field survey led by basram of this valley that i'd seen during this brief recon and while he was doing that as it turns

out there wasn't anything of interest in that valley anyway that i initially had a look at which is not unusual for me but basramran being Basran, during that survey, met some local Bugis people, some local farmers from the village there, and they told him about this hidden valley located kind of adjacent to the valley that they were in. And that was inhabited by quite a reclusive community of local people who were very, very isolated, but were renowned for their incredible palm wine, which they would, I think it's a process of distillation, actually. From the heart of these palm trees, they brew this drink called Baloch, which is very powerful palm wine, essentially.

And they were widely reputed for making the best Baloch in all of South Sulawesi. So anyway, Basran being led both by the desire for archaeological discovery and the desire for the best palm wine in the region led the team into this valley which is quite difficult to get to and then just entered this spectacular pristine valley which is yeah it's just an amazing place and once they're hooked up with this tiny little community and they was as simple as looking from the village headman's house over to this cave which was on the other side of the valley walked over into it and there were these as always in indonesia often the farmers use the front of these caves to store sacks of rice and timbers for their houses to

keep them out of the rain but they oftentimes don't always explore into the back of the cave often out of fear of spirits and ghosts and various other malevolent forces indonesia having a very vibrant ghost culture but basaran explored into the back of this cave and there found this rock art scene that the locals had never noticed before or they claimed that they'd never noticed it before and from that initial discovery in December 2017 now we finally managed to publish it so that's the story of how it was found initially but I first saw the images when bus run whatsapp them to me on my bloody handphone so unfortunately I didn't get to be there for that

eureka moment. Adam that that's an amazing story. And let's not keep the suspense any longer. What does this new discovery, what does it show? Well, I'll start first with the image itself. For those of your listeners that have been following some of the stories about it, it's a cave painting on the rear wall of this limestone cave, which is known as Liang Tedonge. And Liang is the Indonesian word essentially for a hole or a cavity it was the root word anyway for that and it's essentially

means cave and tedong which is very difficult to pronounce it's essentially the name of a local person anyway and in the back of this cave is this beautiful rock art scene which depicts three pigs, three wild pigs, and they're engaged in some sort of social interaction. It's not really very clear what's going on in this scene, but it really seems to be a single narrative composition. It's all painted essentially in the same shade of red ochreous pigment, and the pigs are quite beautifully illustrated. They're anatomically realistic in some senses, but quite stylized in terms of the manner of artistic depiction. These are not photorealistic representations of this particular species of wild pig,

but there's a realism to them. I think that was a strong part of the stylistic convention of the art. You can see that these are pigs. They're engaged in some sort of story going on behind this artwork's some sort of record of the social lives of these pigs or at least the social lives as perceived by these ancient human artists and we've dated it to at least 45 and a half thousand years ago and we're dated one of the pig figures and we then infer that the rest of the scene is probably of a similar antiquity and yeah as we said at the beginning this seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world as far as we can tell anywhere in the world which is pretty interesting to really

sit back and think about that. Simple question what kind of pigs are we talking about here? This is a species known as Sus celibensis the common name is the Sulawesi warty pig or the Celebes warty pig. And they're an endemic species that we think evolved, well, current evidence suggests this species evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago on the island of Sulawesi. They're quite small-sized pigs. The range is from around about 40 to 85 kilograms, which is pretty small, small actually for a pig. In fact, the Australian RSPCA, according to their guidelines, would rank this species of pig

in the upper range of mini pigs, you know, the sort of pigs that you're allowed to keep and have sleep in your bed and all that sort of thing as pets. So you're allowed to keep a pig up to that size, anything above that, you know, you're allowed to keep a pig up to that size. Anything above that, you know, you're facing some difficulties. But they were quite small little pigs, and they're still found on the island. They're becoming more rare, certainly, because they're seen by local people as an agricultural pest, and they will target them for eradication.

But, yeah, they're still there, and you also do find them, they were moved moved as far as we can tell this species was moved by prehistoric humans from siloase to certain other islands in the wider region which is a real mystery as to when and how and why that happened and also they appear to be the only species of the sewer day the only pig species in the world, apart from susgrofa, you know, all the bacon sarnies you've ever eaten in your entire life and pork-filled Cumberland sausages come from a single species of pig, susgrofa, domesticated possibly independently in West Asia and possibly in China around about the same time in the earliest stages of the Neolithic farming transition,

around about 10 000 years ago the eurasian wild boar suscropha the dominant the only domesticated species in the world except for this bizarre little endemic pig found on the island of sulawesi which in some of these other islands it was moved to has been documented as a fully domesticated village pig up until the 1970s, which is very, very unusual. It's the other domestic pig, which is, yeah, very strange. So anyway, but these are, we would assume, at this very early point in time, this was the wild ancestor of Susilabensis

that these ancient Ice Age artists were depicting. And yeah, I mean, this is almost all of the rock art depictions of animals that we see in Sulawesi well over 80% are of this one species which is really interesting you know these early ice age people were almost obsessed with this one species of pig these warty pigs. They're called warty pigs because they have well warts on their faces they have three sets of facial warts and as they get older, especially the males, these warts become extremely pronounced. In fact, you can see that these artists also depicted

these warts on the faces of these pigs in the form of these pair of almost horn-like protrusions midway along the snout of the pig figures. So this was an important feature I think that they were quite keen to convey, these quite striking and quite repulsive looking facial warts that they develop. I love them. They're beautiful little pigs. Well, I did a Google search of the Sulawesi pigs. And yes, yes, lovely. Quite scarring, though, for their first impressions, I must admit. Yeah, well, actually, you probably, the Sustalobansis is quite, it's a very understudied pig. And I'm not sure the images you might have seen are of the Barbirusa, which is this the one with these huge big tusks that dominate the face? Yes, that's it.

No, this is a different species. That's its own genus, essentially. That's a very different kettle of fish. Yeah, they are amazing, those creatures. We're not even really sure what their ancestral origins are. But Sussalabensis is very different, and they're much more closely related to Suscrophia. those creatures. We're not even really sure what their ancestral origins are, but Sucilabensis is very different and they're much more closely related to Suscrophia, in fact. But Barbarossa, yeah, they're still there on the island, even rarer than Sucilabensis, but they're

the most striking looking animals you've just seen by the Google searching. But we have not found a single clear depiction of these animals, these pigs, in the rock art, which is amazing, considering they're just very distinctive looking. But yeah, for whatever it was, it's on this more mundane, if you like, other species of pig, which is rarely kept in zoos today, and they're understudied, and it's quite hard to find clear images, even through Google searching, of Sucilabenzas. Most of the clear images now are probably from this ancient rock art's depiction,

because you mentioned that this is more than 45,000 years old, which is remarkable in itself. Adam, how were you able to date it? Well, first of all, I should say, as I'm sure you're aware, Tristan, prehistoric rock art is very, very difficult to date it? Well first of all I should say as I'm sure you're aware Tristan prehistoric rock art is very very difficult to date it's one of the most challenging of all archaeological features or remains or however you wish to categorize it to date it's not found in an archaeological context you're not excavating a coherent series of archaeological layers finding this art in

context and then being able to either directly date it or the surrounding sediments it's there it's just exposed on the walls of these caves or the ceilings of these caves and for that reason and oftentimes the actual the pigment themselves the pigments used to create the art it's not possible to reliably date them unless you're in the part of the world like Europe, where the pigments themselves were created from charcoal, which obviously can radiocarbon date. But we don't really, at least in the early rock art in Sulawesi, early people were not using charcoal. They were using mineral-based pigments, ochre, and you can't date that. But we're fortunate in this case because it's made in a limestone cast environment.

in this case because it's made in a limestone cast environment we have calcium carbonate precipitation that has led to the development or the growth of these small calcite deposits on top of the paintings what are known as coralloid speleothems or cave popcorn because these little mineral nodular crusts features that resemble there it looks like someone stuck a bunch of popcorn onto the cave wall. To me, they look more like tiny little cauliflowers, but it's, I don't know, cave cauliflower doesn't have the same sort of ring to it, I suppose. But look, we're able to date these when they started to form using a method known as uranium series dating. And I should stress from the beginning, I'm the archaeologist, not the rock art dating specialist. So any attempt to grill me on exactly how the dating method works is not going to end well for me.

But yeah, it's essentially the method measures the radioactive decay of uranium and other elements within the calcite, which provides a way of dating when it started to form. And that then, because these calcite deposits formed on top of the art, provides us with the minimum age for the painting itself. It could be much older for all we know. All we really have in this case is a minimum age, which in the case of this rock art painting, again, is 45,500. And going on from that, you also mentioned earlier how it was painted,

I mean, what do we know about this prehistoric paint? We're still at a preliminary stage of doing mineralogical analyses and geochemical studies of the pigment itself. You know we need to do more research on that but based on the work we've done so far including some unpublished research which is under review at the moment, using PXRF and various other methods of analysis. It looks like, for the majority of cases, it looks like an ironstone hematite that they were using, essentially an iron-rich rock. And these ancient artists would have then taken this rock, don't know exactly where they were getting it from in the landscape,

unlike in parts of Australia where we have Aboriginal people, modern Aboriginal people still have knowledge and memories of where they got the ochre from originally in the recent past from these quarries, ochre quarries in the landscape. In South Sulawesi, we have yet to find getting hold of this iron-rich rock, crushing it up, pulverizing it to produce this powder, which they would then mix with water and possibly other liquids to create this paint. And then in the case of the early figurative depictions of animals, they were using, it looks like they were using some sort of brush then to apply the paint directly to the wall, literally, you know, brush strokes to produce the imagery. Sometimes they might have used their finger to apply the paint directly to the wall literally you know brush strokes to produce the imagery sometimes they might have used their finger to trace the images and then in other cases we see the hand stencils where they've sprayed a mouthful of paint around the hand to produce a

negative impression of it so we need to do more work to figure out where they're getting the pigment from whether there were different sources the extent to which trade and exchange networks were involved in procuring the pigments. There's a whole lot of work that we're still at an early stage of, you know, we're still really in the pioneering stage and trying to nail down the age in the chronology and in future doing the more detailed specialist analyses that will provide insight into these other very interesting components of this early world.

Brilliant. And let's put this discovery in a, shall we say, global perspective now. Let's have a look at some other examples from other parts of the world and how they compare European figurative cave art, the earliest European figurative cave art. What is the closest dating figurative cave art that we have from Europe compared to this latest discovery from Indonesia? figurative cave art that we have from Europe compared to this latest discovery from Indonesia? Oh God, okay. So when we say cave art, we should distinguish between, let's just say at this stage, it means art that made inside caves, just for purposes of simplifying our discussion. So then we have two types, at least, in terms of the way archaeologists would recognise it. We have the parietal art, made on the walls and the ceililings of the caves or on other surfaces of rocks that are not mobile, large boulders, cliff faces,

those sorts of places. This is what we tend to think of classically as rock art. Then those forms of art, including everything from paintings to engravings to drawings to other sorts of markings that constitute images in our beliefs today. And then the other form being portable art, decorative elements of handheld tools, spear throwers, carvings on bone objects, non-utilitarian carvings or markings or patterns, down to the beautiful figurative art that we see engraved on bone surfaces and limestone tablet-like cobbles, which is a recurring feature of the upper Paleolithic rock art in Europe, down to three-dimensional carved statuettes or three-dimensional figurines moulded from fired clay, like we see in parts of Central Europe as

well at that early time. So the portable art and parietal art, I guess, were the two forms. And in Europe, again, you know, this is from an outsider looking in, from memory, I think the earliest evidence of figurative art currently would be the famous lion man statuette, I believe, from Germany, which I believe has been dated to around about 40,000 years ago. And this is a carving of a humanoid-like figure with the head of a cave line measures about 30 centimeters in length and it's being crafted from a piece of mammoth ivory lots of arguments and lots of ink has been spilled trying to deduce the meaning of that particular object but it i think in a range of other carved three-dimensional figurines again from the

origination period in Germany, the culture associated with the first modern humans tend to that region. You're talking around about 40,000 years for the representational or figurative art in that region. I think there will definitely be some Paleolithic European archaeologists that could possibly contest that statement.

But at least based on my understanding, that means that our, I mean, it's not a competition. It doesn't matter. It makes it sound like, you know, this is not a game show. But if you want to look at it in terms of the current claims, then yeah, the Sulawesi destroys anything you guys have from Europe. I mean, it seems to be at least a minimum age a little bit earlier. So, yeah, to cut a long story short apologies i asked that question because i was just wondering about the whole debate around

the origins of cave arts especially like for figurative cave arts for the early humans does this really suggest the old age of this suluasi cave art does it really suggest that cave art it either came with the first humans that were coming down to Southeast Asia or that it originated from Africa. I think the evidence is, for a long time, has been building up and pointing to the argument that cave art traditions, the first figurative artworks, originated in Upper Paleolithic Europe around about 40,000 years ago. This is an argument that's been around or a belief that's been around for a long time. You know, this notion that something happened in these Ice Age caves of Europe

that fundamentally changed humanity. Humanity emerged in Africa, but for whatever reason, well, there's a number of reasons. The incredible richness of the early archaeological record of Upper Paleolithic Europe, the stunning artworks from Shore Valley Cave and innumerable other sites in that region,

just some of the most sublime artworks ever produced by humanity, in my opinion. It's been seen as the place where true art evolved. And again, there was something happened in our minds that changed forever the intelligence and the cognitive ability of our species. And then presumably from that point in Europe, spread like a bow wave throughout the rest of the world. This has been a view that's been held for a long time, but I think more and more the evidence is now starting

to point to, look, these abilities and this artistic culture more than likely emerged at an earlier point in the human journey. and whether that was in an adjacent part of the Eurasian continent somewhere in Asia or possibly even yeah who knows down in Southeast Asia somewhere Indonesia possibly but yeah my money would be on somewhere in Africa where our species evolved and probably at a remote period in time which if we ever found convincing evidence for it would come as a huge surprise to us you never know but I think that's the story Tristan but archaeology is about storytelling but we need that evidence and currently we just don't have it but I would say that using images to tell stories is a very ancient part of who we are. Well let's go back then to

Southeast Asia. And before we really go on to the island of Sulawesi and your other sites there and the discoveries that you guys have made, the latest discovery in the design, in what it depicts, do we see any similarities with early cave art, figurative cave art that we have from, for instance, mainland Southeast Asia or from Australia?

With mainland, you know, if we look at what we have in Sulawesi and if we cast our direction to the west, to the mainland, the rock art is not as well documented there so far as what we find in Indonesia. And when I say Indonesia, most of the rock art sites known from Indonesia are really from the eastern part of the archipelago. There's a handful, I don't know if you can try to imagine the geography of Indonesia, but to the very west, you have the large islands of Sumatra and Java. And these islands have only yielded very limited numbers of cave art sites, very, very limited. But then when we go further

east and roughly in the center of the archipelago, we get to Sulawesi, quite a a lot of rock art now appearing and then into some of the eastern islands on the way over to Papua more and more rock art sites appearing so we've got relatively rich concentrations of rock art in the eastern part of Indonesia at this stage that are emerging and sorry more from Borneo as well from the jungles in northeast Borneo but then it becomes a whole different story once you get to australia it's been said before that australia probably has the richest concentrations of rock art in the world it's just there is a lot of rock art in australia in particular in the two major rock art provinces in northern australia of the kimberley region in northwest australia and the kakadu and arnhem land regions in the top end, as it's called.

And this is huge amounts of rock art there, okay? So look, going back to mainland Southeast Asia, we can't really say at this stage. The evidence is, in my opinion, the evidence is not there in sufficient abundance to be able to make any meaningful comparisons. But then when we look at the very well-studied rock art, immense record of rock art in Northern Australia, in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land, we do find what seems to be

based on studies of superimposition and various other relative methods of rock art dating, there does seem to be a very early phase in those sandstone rock shelters in Arnhem Land and Kakadu that does seem to resemble superficially at least the style of animal figurative animal representation that we see that we've now dated to the ice age in Sulawesi and also in Borneo. These are depictions of animals that typically they're large animals large mammals or marsupials in the case of the northern Australian rock art focus on kangaroos macropods and they're always shown in side profile with an outline most of the anatomical detail occurring in the outline of the animal and then that outline of the animal shown in side profile is infilled usually not with

realistic anatomical detail but sort of almost a random pattern or irregular pattern of lines and dashes which is you know quite a distinctive way of depicting these animals so we do see that these possible links between the earliest known dated depictions of animals in southeast asia or indonesia at least and what we do have in northern australia but at this stage this early phase of rock art in australia is, the age of it has not been nailed down. So it could just be that these are superficial similarities that don't have any real meaning beyond the stories we like to tell about it ourselves. But it is possible. I mean, why not? It's a reasonable hypothesis that the first modern humans to disperse from mainland

Asia through the islands of Wallasea and all the way to Australia at least 65,000 years ago it's not unreasonable to argue that they brought this rock art tradition with them and you know we're finding traces of it on some of the islands in Indonesia and and then we're seeing how it evolved down to the recent past in Australia it's possible. Yeah I find that possible prehistoric connectivity and you see the evolution that you can see from the rock art absolutely astonishing in its own right but adam let's go focusing in then on sula wesi and this part of the island because as you have said during this interview this is the

latest discovery but you and your team and the people on the island do you have found lots of examples of very early dating rock art from this part of the world. Yes, yes, lots. I mean, we first published the Pleistocene Ages, the very first Pleistocene dates for rock art back in 2014. And there we showed that image of a human hand dated to at least 40,000 years ago. And an animal painting was at least, I think, 35,000. Then in 2019, we published this discovery and dating of

this spectacular rock art scene from the same region which seems to depict this prehistoric hunt conducted by these tiny little figures which seem to be part human part animal. These hybrid human animal like figures hunting these Sulawesi warty pigs once again, as well as a species of endemic dwarf buffalo, the Inoa, also found in Sulawesi. Incredible little creatures, about a metre tall. So this was this incredible hunting scene, which we, again, using the same method, dated to at least 44,000 years ago. And that, we believe, could be the earliest depiction of of a supernatural being

you know the earliest evidence that we have for the ability for people to imagine things that don't exist these therianthropes these human figures with animal heads is really interesting find so that's 44 000 years old and we have this new cave art discovery we've just published and we've got i wouldn't say we've got a lot of samples because it's very difficult. There's a lot of rock art there, but it's only in very rare circumstances where we'll find one of these little calcite growths

forming over the top of a painting. And that calcite growth then being of sufficient quality for dating. But we do have other samples that we've collected, which we're in the process of dating now. And we just never can be sure how much older some of this rock art can be and not you know it's not always just a matter of striving for the older dates it's also trying to figure out how this culture changed over time how this artistic culture changed over time are we dealing with in situ evolution of a artistic output of a single human population? Were there subsequent waves of people

coming in bringing new rock art styles? You know, are we seeing this right now always, we've just got these isolated dates, which really highlight the global importance of this rock art. But yeah, big question now is trying to figure out what was going on in this world. And to me, it's, yeah, this is one of the most fascinating things. I mean, look, I really want to try to unlock the mystery of who these people were. We still haven't found any fossils from any of these people. We assume that they were closely related to the first Australians,

but we're yet to find any skeletal remains of these Ice Age cave artists. We've been excavating some of their sites, so we understand a little bit more about other aspects of their culture and technology and economy but you know really they remain a mystery to us and we need to do a lot more work to get to the depth of and the richness of knowledge that archaeologists have for upper palaeolithic people in europe that's for sure and these examples of cave art that we found in siloesi you mentioned that from all these isolated cases, do we get an idea as the ones that you've been able to date that do we see the art evolving in certain ways?

Do we see different things being depicted as time goes on? We don't have that temporal dimension yet. I mean, we do, of course, but in terms of that span of dates, which would enable us to us to say okay at roughly 40,000 years ago we can see what their artistic culture and their iconography was at that point we can see what it was like and then when we move forward through time another 5,000 years or another 10,000 or 20,000 years to around about the time of the last glacial maximum oh yeah we can see they started focusing on different types of animals or there were major changes in the manner of depiction of animal art and so forth. We just don't have that yet, Tristan.

The key is we really need to try to find and to try to establish more tightly bracketed minimum and maximum ages for individual artworks. As I said before, most of the time we've only been able to obtain minimum ages based on dating the calcite growths that developed over the top of the rock art. So all we can say, for example, is, oh, that rock art is at least 45,000 years old, but it could be 65,000 years old for all we know. But what we really need is these more tightly constrained minimum and maximum ages, which can only be obtained currently. And we've only established, I think, one or two samples where one of these little popcorn growths began to form on the cave wall. Then the artists came along, painted their artwork over the top of that little mineral growth, and then that growth continued to form.

of that little mineral growth and then that growth continued to form so that when you sample the calcite growth the little popcorn and saw it in half you can look at all the little layers of calcite starting at the cave wall surface itself the canvas on which these people made the art and then you can see some of that calcite mineral there some of the layers and then you can see the pigment layer on top and then on top of the pigment you can see where the calcite continued to form until eventually it stopped developing so there in only very rare circumstances we can date below the pigment and above the pigment get a maximum and a minimum age but that was a hand stencil i think so unfortunately we haven't got that yet for a animal depiction i think you know it's just a matter of continuing the research

and hoping we get lucky and always trying to keep in mind that we can be negative about it and say, oh, you know, I wish we had insight into this or that. But really, we're quite fortunate even to be where we are at this stage. Without knowledge, it's very rare in the world. There's only a handful of places in the world where you can do this uranium series dating on rock art in an accurate way. Sulawesi, Spain, I struggle to think of the other locations. I think Russia maybe, but

Spain and Sulawesi so far are the two key parts of the world that have yielded this relatively large number of dates. Well, that brings me on to the next thing. Why, of all places, why Sulawesi do we see such a rich concentration of rock art that we've been able to find from sometimes as much as 45,000 years ago? I think going back, it's a number of things. First of all, there's just the ease, as I said before, like it's relatively easy to do research logistically in that area. So we've been able to cover a lot more ground and find a lot more sites with a smaller amount of investment of time and energy and money, frankly, than in other parts of this region, such as Kelimantan. I wouldn't want to do the calculations, but for every one new rock art site we find in Borneo, you're talking another 20 you could find in the same

time and with the same investment of money in Sulawesi. It's just chalk and cheese in terms of just the pragmatic aspects of doing fieldwork in Indonesia. So there's that, it's proximity to a major capital city and so forth. And also, this was, I think it was, you could be looking at higher population levels, higher population density. It was a very rich environment, this lowland forests surrounding these karst area which would have been teeming with animal life we find almost every single cave site just has huge numbers of stone artifacts scattered all over the surfaces it may well have been a densely populated place where just by nature a lot of rock art was being made and again and just flukes of

preservation whatever it is about this particular region like i should mention that a lot of rock art was being made and again and just flukes of preservation whatever it is about this particular region like i should mention that a lot of the rock art sites and if your listeners have seen some of the images we published in our paper on this new cave art site you will see how much of the cave art is actually eroded away as due to exfoliation of the limestone cave wall on which it was created it's disappearing at a very alarming rate and in every single cave art site we've found so far in Sulawesi we're seeing this phenomenon occurring it's not sure exactly what causes it but the cave wall itself just flakes away and takes the rock art with it obliterates whatever you know had been painted on that cave wall

and I think this is happening in a lot of areas, in the karst areas in Indonesia. So it could be that a lot of the early rock art has not survived on some of these other islands. Or it could be something about humans crossing the Wallace Line, this major biogeographical boundary separating the world of Asia from the world of Australia. Could be that something about life in Sulawesi again led to higher population levels or

it changed the way people were making rock art and they started making more of it. These are very simple answers to, well it's a very simple question you asked but it's deceptively complex that's for sure and we just we've got so few of the details in our hands at this stage that I really can't do anything but venture these speculations absolutely and i'm always wary of that when i'm asking these questions because this is so far away in the past and there's so much speculation around it from these discoveries that it's always difficult to give any concrete answers for these questions i read these reports of in spain they're still finding these rock art sites you know there's a spectacular one that was announced I saw only quite recently.

You know, this is in Spain where the first Ice Age cave art was properly recognised and they're still finding rock art even in very, very well explored places in France and Spain that have been subject to generations of research by archaeologists. Chauvet Cave, for example, in the mid-90s. But boy, you know, just imagine how much more is out there waiting to be discovered in places like Sulawesi. That's going to be the next thing to finish it all off. I mean, Adam, from all that you've been saying, it sounds very

exciting for the future for your team, for this team of real-life Indiana Joneses, for finding more amazing rock art, which will tell us more about this time in prehistory. Yeah, hopefully. There's much to look forward to in the future, Tristan. We just need to get past this, what will soon be a distant memory of not being able to go out into the field. But look, you know, if we can get past this and reconnect with our colleagues in Indonesia again and get back in a business, there's a lot of exploration and discovery waiting to be done. Well, best of luck with that. Keep in touch because I can't wait to hear more about it in the future. Adam thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show

and at such short notice. Mate it was a pleasure thank you Tristan and yeah stay safe over there. Thank you.