August 29, 2024 • 29 mins
Over 50,000 years ago on what is now the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, someone climbed a towering rock formation and painted a mysterious image on a cave ceiling. The painting shows three half-human, half-animal figures and a large wild pig. The image, dated to 51,200 years old, is now the oldest known visual story in the world. In this episode, archaeologist Adam Brumm shares the story of this incredible discovery.
Help make more Origin Stories. We're $3,000 short of our quadruple-match fundraising goal and our deadline is August 31! Please donate today and your gift will be quadruple-matched! Click here to 4x your donation!
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
Links to learn more:
- Google Arts and Culture virtual tour of the cave art site
- Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago Nature, July 2024
- Adam Brumm's website
- Blog post by Adhi Oktaviana
Episode produced by Meredith Johnson and Ray Pang
Sound design by Ray Pang
Edited by Audrey Quinn
Theme music by Henry Nagle. Ending credit music by Lee Roservere. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Hungry for more science?
Lunch Break Science is The Leakey Foundation's web series featuring short talks and interviews with Leakey Foundation grantees. Episodes stream on the third Thursday of every month.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This is Origin Stories, theLeaky Foundation podcast.
I'm Meredith Johnson.Before we get to the story,
I want to thank all of youfor supporting the show.
We're a donor-supported nonprofit,and every donation makes a difference.
We're getting close to the deadlinefor our quadruple-match challenge,
(00:21):
and we're short of our goal.
If we can raise $3,000 moreby the end of the month,
that's August 31st, we'll get$20,000 to help make origin stories.
So if you give $25 right now, we get $100.
We don't want to leave thischallenge money on the table,
(00:42):
so please go to leakyfoundation.org/originstories right now to make a donation.
Your gift will be quadruple-matched.Thank you so much for helping us out,
and thanks
for listening to the show.Now, here's our story.
One day more than 50,000years ago on what's now the
(01:06):
Indonesian Island of Sui,
someone climbed a towering rock formationto paint a picture on the ceiling
of a cave, almost 500 feet off the ground.
A picture that tells a storyusing a purplish red mineral
pigment, they painted mysterioushuman figures and a wild pig.
The Figures could be hunting this pigor they could be doing some sort of
(01:28):
ritual. The meaning is lost through time,
but it's clear that this picturehas meaning and action and a story.
This painting is now the oldest knownexample of visual storytelling in the
world,
and it's older than the figurativecave paintings of France and Spain.
It gives us a window into the worldand the minds of our ancient ancestors.
(01:51):
The discovery was just publishedin the Journal Nature this July,
and today on the show we'll hear thestory of these mysterious images,
where they were found, how scientistsdid the tricky work of dating them,
and what this art might tellus about human evolution,
human imagination and culture.
There are lots of archeologists that feela real human connection when they hold
(02:13):
a stone tool, for example, in their hand,
that maybe it's a sense ofconnection to those early people,
and it is obviously areflection into their minds.
But art is in a different league.
That's Adam Brum. Adam is aprofessor at Griffith University.
In Brisbane, which is thecapital of Queensland, Australia. I'm an archeologist.
(02:33):
Most of my work is based in Indonesia,
and I'm looking at the very earliesthuman settlement of that region.
Adam first went to Indonesia to tryto understand ancient hominins through
finding and studying fossilsand artifacts like stone tools.
He had no idea then, but the discoverieshe and his collaborators would make,
(02:56):
there would be about something evenmore uniquely human than tools.
Some of the first hominin fossils foundanywhere in the world were found in
Indonesia in 1891 on the island of Java.
These were the remains of ahomoerectus nicknamed Java Man,
(03:17):
and there's evidence that Homo erectuswas there from at least 1.2 million years
ago, maybe even as farback as 1.5 million.
And back then in the ice agewhen sea levels were lower,
Java wasn't an island like it is now.
It was part of an enormouscontinental landmass called Sunda.
So Java was essentially thevery southeastern tip of Asia,
(03:39):
and the fact that Javaman was there so long ago,
it makes sense his species couldhave made that journey on foot.
The real mystery is when they managedto get across from this continental
landmass onto these isolated islandsto the east in a region that we call
Wallia,
which is essentially a whole collectionof isolated oceanic islands that have
(03:59):
never had a direct terrestrial landconnection to this ice age landmass.
And then that's whenthings start to get very,
very interesting because we're talkinghominins crossing from a mainland across
major sea gaps to reachthese isolated islands.
The largest of theseisolated islands is Sulawesi,
and much of Adam's careerhas been focused there.
It's the 11th largest island in theworld with many plants and animals that
(04:23):
aren't found anywhere else.
Sulawesi is a fascinating island.It's a very vibrant place.
It it's quite a strangely shaped island.
It essentially consists ofa central mountainous core with a series of radiating
arm like peninsulas coming out of it.
Adam's first research on Sulawesi wasin the southern part of the island in a
(04:44):
region called Maros. It's made upof rural communities and villages,
and its dotted with dramatictowering rock formations that rose up
from the bottom of thesea millions of years ago.
These towers are formed out of purelimestone and from top to bottom,
they're just riddled withcaves and rock shelters,
(05:04):
and then at the outside of them are allclothed in dense tropical vegetation.
They literally look like towers thatemerge almost like dragon's teeth out of
flat countryside. That's allunder extensive rice cultivation.
It's some of the most stunning landscapescenery, I believe you can see,
and you just know there's just a hugeamount of evidence for ancient human life.
(05:26):
It's quite exhilarating.
With so many caves and rock shelters.
This area of Sulawesi alone could occupyarcheologists and paleoanthropologists
for several lifetimes.
(05:50):
Adam and his collaboratorsstarted work there in 2011,
looking for fossils and stone toolsto help piece together the early human
history of Sulawesi. This workdidn't go as they'd hoped,
but it set them on the path to makingsome of the biggest and most surprising
scientific discoveries of thatdecade and possibly this one too.
Initially,
we started excavating arock shelter called Liang
BorTong two, which means bird cave two.
(06:11):
The site was firstexcavated in the mid 1970s,
and it was pretty much the onlyknown ice age site on the island.
They re-excavated it in an attempt todig deeper and see what they could find.
So the original excavator had reachedabout three or four meters depth
in his archeological trench and hadfound evidence for humans at that
(06:34):
point in time,
stone tools dating to what he thoughtwas 30 to 40,000 years ago at that point.
And so we resolved to go deeper tosee how far back in time the human
occupation record might go there. Andthis being originally Mike Morwood's dig,
he was hoping to find somesort of Sulawesi Hobbits at the bottom of the trench,
but sadly, it was not to be.
(06:54):
We did manage to get about two or threemeters deeper than the 1970s trench,
but the technical problems withthat site are kind of legendary.
So as to exactly what we have,
what the stories are at that siteis a little bit still mysterious.
The site they re excavated was rightnear one of the first sites in Sulawesi,
(07:16):
where in the 1950s a Dutch archeologistnoticed the presence of rock art.
Simple painted images ofhands called hand stencils.
Hand stencils are these images ofhuman hands created by the person would
place the hand against,say the wall of the cave,
and then spray a mouthfulof paint around the hand.
And when they remove the hand,
there would be this negativeoutline left of the hand.
(07:39):
It's a very common art form foundin many prehistoric sites worldwide.
A few days after seeing the hand stencils,
one of the Dutch archeologists teammembers found a naturalistic painting of a
pig.
And then as they started to explore thewider area, there are caves everywhere,
they started to noticemore of this rock art.
I've known about the rock art for along time when I first started to work
(08:01):
Insisi in 2011,
but it was not really verywell known outside Indonesia.
It was assumed not to be particularly old.
So Adam was interested in the rock art,
and he was curious abouthow old this art could be,
but he didn't think it was part of theprehistoric puzzle he was working on.
My primary aim was todig deeper at that site,
(08:22):
but it was when we were taking daysoff on Sundays from the dig and sort of
wandering around exploring all this rockart in these caves that I noticed that
there could be a way to datethe art for the first time.
And then this led us off intothis whole new trajectory,
this whole new avenue of inquiry.
What did you notice?
(08:44):
Well, can I tell a story about, yeah,please tell me what happened that day.
It was in 2011,
the first season of this Stig inLiang Bong two, this cave site,
and we'd dig for six days a week, andon Sunday we would take a day off,
and one of my Indonesiancolleagues, Budianto Budi Hakim,
who's a legendary archeologist of SouthSulawes from the local Bugis community,
(09:09):
he knows all of the sites in that area,all the archeology sites in Maros.
And he told me about thisone site called Liang Jarre,
which is known as the Cave of theFingers. Literally translated.
This cave is known for itshand stencil paintings,
and some of them have thesecuriously pointed fingers.
So Mr. Budi invites him along to thesite and they go there with all their
(09:32):
Indonesian students.
Just as we're about towalk up to the site.
There was this huge torrential downpour.
We rushed into this local village wherethe people there looked after us and
took us into their house and fedus corn jagom which is a very
popular snack in South Sulawesi.
And so we're eating this roastedcorn waiting for the rain to stop.
(09:54):
And so I was wondering whatwe going to find in the site.
And so the corn itself isslightly significant here,
so bear that in mind. Anyway, soit stops raining after a while,
and we go up into this cave site,
and booty was trying to get meinterested in excavating the site itself.
As I explained earlier, we're havingsome difficulties at the main dig site,
but I looked at the site itself and Ithought, yeah, it's interesting to dig,
(10:17):
but we were too busy at theother site. As it turns out,
Budi excavated there later andfound a very important discovery,
so I was wrong about that.Anyway, but on this day,
we're looking at these hand stencils,exploring the site and looking around.
And then there was this one part ofthe wall, this limestone cave wall,
which had lots and lots ofthese images of human hands.
Scientists generally believe thesecouldn't have been more than a couple
(10:41):
thousand years old. And he's lookingat these paintings and again,
wondering how old could they be?
But then looking at oneseries of hand stencils,
I noticed these funny littlegrowths all over them.
They kind of looked a little bit likewhiteish gray warts or little bits
of cauliflower almost stuck to the topof these hand stencils. And in fact,
(11:02):
there were so many of them in some casesthat they almost completely obscured
these hand stencils.
The hand stencils themselves are madeout of this sort of reddish purplish
paint,
which usually stand out quite wellagainst the whiteish gray of the
limestone walls. But in some cases,
these little funny little growths werealmost completely blotting out these hand
(11:22):
stencils. I was thinking,what are these things?
I thought maybe there was some sortof microbial growths or something,
but they seem very, very hard.Okay, these little wartlike growths.
And I thought at thatstage that well, rock art,
it's very difficult to date,
but this could provide a means potentiallyof dating the artworks themselves.
(11:42):
Rock art paintings are typicallymade with minerals like ochre,
which is a natural earth pigment ochredoesn't have carbon scientists can use to
figure out dates, but these wartswere on top of the paintings,
so they had to have formedafter the paintings were made.
And Adam wondered if the little wartygrowths could be used as sort of a time
(12:03):
marker, because if youcould date the growths,
you would know that the art underneathwas at least as old as the growth that
had formed on top of it.
So he took a whole series of detailedphotos and he brought them back to
Australia.
At that time, I was sharing my officewith my colleague, Dr. Maxime Aubert Max.
He's a French Canadian, andthen he, funnily enough,
(12:26):
was probably the world's leadingexpert in rock art dating,
using a method at that time,known as uranium series analysis.
This is a method that measures theradioactive decay of uranium within things
like these growths on topof the rock art paintings,
and that decay can betranslated into time.
And if you're lucky enough to havesome of these little calcium carbonate
(12:47):
growths forming over the top of therock art, then using this method,
he was an expert inuranium series analysis.
You can infer an age for the artworksthemselves. So I was lucky enough,
it's just coincidence that he was in myoffice and I showed him images of these
little funny growths over the top ofthese hand stencils in the cave of fingers
in South Sil Oasis, and he wasvery excited. As soon as he saw it,
(13:09):
he tried to date enough rock art torealize that this was a big opportunity.
So he immediately said, yep,
I'm going to come over and take somesamples of those things first opportunity,
and we're going to try to date'em. And that's where it led to.
But the reason I initially mentionedcorn was there is a connection.
Those little growths turned out to bewhat Theologists referred to as oid spill
(13:30):
thas, or in the common term cave popcorn.
So yeah,
I've always thought there was a strangeconnection between eating that corn
before I went into the cave and thenfinding these cave popcorns all over this
art that eventually provided away for us to date it. So anyway,
it's a meaningful story to me. Yeah.
(13:52):
The next year, Maxime Aubert,the rock art dating expert,
came and took samples of cavepopcorn from several sites in Maros.
He took them back tothe lab and dated them.
They turned out to beunexpectedly old, incredibly old.
I wasn't really sure whatto expect. In hindsight,
we were digging a site that was 30 or40,000 years old in the same area where we
(14:15):
have this rock art.
So we knew that there were humansthere at a very early point in time,
and we were finding ochre,so mineral pigments,
the same pigments that wereprobably used to produce this art.
We were finding these pigments inthe archeological layers at 30,
40,000 years ago. So in hindsight,
I should have expected thatthat rock art would be very old,
(14:38):
but I didn't really knowwhat to expect, to be honest.
But it turned out to be incredibly old.
40,000 years old wasthe date of 40,000 for
a hand. Stansil was what max producedin those early days back 2012.
And that was incredibly exciting becausethat was by far the earliest evidence
we had anywhere outsideEurope really for rock art
(15:01):
production. So that was, at that time,
it was compatible in age with the earliestrock art known from France and Spain,
which was pretty unexpected and exciting.
So they had this very surprising,
very ancient rock art from thehumid tropical island of soi.
They had a very exciting date of 40,000years for a hand stencil painting,
(15:22):
but it was maybe a little too unexpectedfor some of the scientific journals at
the time.
We actually had some difficulty convincingat our esteemed colleagues through
the peer review process of thesignificance of the finding.
Adam figured it had something to do withthe simplicity of the paintings they'd
found, like sure,
they were similar in age to the veryold paintings found in France and Spain,
(15:46):
but they were just hand stencils,
not the mind blowing masterpiece,animal drawings of the European caves.
We had to find animal art, okay.
We had to find these early dates onsimilarly spectacular images of the animal
world, which the European,European artists justly famous for.
Ma did have animal art,
(16:07):
large naturalistic paintings of wild pigs,
and these small wild cattle calledAnoa. Those paintings were rare,
and the ones they found so fardidn't have the cave popcorn,
so they couldn't prove their age.
So we spent a lot of time exploring,
visiting every site that our Indonesianarcheologists colleagues knew about that
had animal art. And eventuallyat a site called Liang sang,
(16:31):
which is actually quite close toall the sites we'd been digging.
I went in there one day again withBudianto Hakim with Budi, Mr. Budi,
that means as the standard way ofreferring to people in Indonesia to blokes
to men. And I went into thesite with the famous Mr. Budi,
and there's lots of handstencils everywhere, as always,
(16:51):
lots of popcorn on the walls.
And I was looking up at theceiling getting a little bit dispirited because we'd
looked for this animal laugh for so long.And then I was looking at the ceiling,
and then I went, wait on inamongst all this cave popcorns,
it's called a dark smudge ceilingof this cave. I noticed this sort of
ghostly outline of what looked like apig. And I was like, what's going on here,
(17:13):
Budi? And he looked up and he thought, oh,
it's the first time I've seen that pigpainting. And I was like, oh, okay. Wow.
And then it was so hard to see becauseit was just covered with cave popcorn.
It was this painting of a pig,
maybe about a meter or ameter and a half in length,
and quite a simple portrayal.
But clearly you could see theanatomical fidelity in the outline,
(17:33):
depiction of this pigshown inside profile,
and it was covered with cave popcorn.And immediately I rang Max, my colleague,
who was out exploringother caves in that region.
Maxime Aubert was able to confirm thatthey now had animal paintings that were
at least 40,000 years old.
On the strength of that, weconvinced our colleagues,
we convinced the editor ofNature and it was published,
(17:55):
and the American Association forthe Advancement of Science deemed
that discovery to be one of the top 10breakthroughs of the year in any field of
scientific research that year.When we published it in 2014,
I think it was that animal artthat got us there. And so that's,
with that very long seguetakes me into the next phase of
(18:17):
our research in Maros, which hasreally been focused on this animal art.
Adam's archeology colleagues in Indonesiaexpanded their search for animal art.
They did years of intense surveying,
and they found hundreds of new rock artsites in a 450 kilometer square area.
For people listening in the US that's300 square miles about the size of New
(18:41):
York City. Through these searches,
they went from around 90 known rockart sites in the Morros area to over
600.
And there's still more. They'refinding scores of new sites every year.
This is just in areas that are surroundedby villages that people have lived in
for generations.
But you just keep finding more and moresites because the entrances to these
(19:04):
caves are almost impossibleto see from the ground.
They're clothed in dense vegetation.
You have to do some seriousclimbing and exploring.
A lot of the cave art sitesare located in high levels,
and you'll find rock art caves atleast 150 meters above the current
ground surface.
These ancient people went to a lot ofeffort to get up to the tops of these
towers to make this art probably forsome sort of ritual or symbolic purposes.
(19:28):
As the team continued to look, theycontinued to find more and more paintings.
When he wasn't in Sulawesi Adam's phonewas blowing up with updates from his
colleagues in Indonesia.
I'd be in my office in Brisbane,
and then I would be getting all theseWhatsApp messages with all these new
images, dozens of newsites with animal art
(19:49):
paintings of these wild pigs,
paintings of these wilddwarf buffalo, the owas,
and they just would blow me away. Andthen one day I received this one message,
I think it was just beforeChristmas in 2017, and my colleague,
who was an Indonesian rock art specialist,
(20:11):
Adhi Agus or as his nickname is,
and he was actually also a PhD studentof ours at Griffith at that time,
and he sent me this incredible WhatsAppimage of this new site that had just
been found in Maro in the verynorthern park called Leang Burang
four.
And I was just blown away. I mean,
(20:34):
they were quite fuzzy pixelated images,
but I could see that this was avery rare depiction of a dwarf
buffalo. And there was somesort of something else,
something more.
You can see what looked like theselittle lines emerging from the chest
area of this painting,of this dwarf buffalo,
(20:55):
which to me looked like they could bespears or something like that. All of.
The animal paintings they'd foundbefore had been just that animals,
but here was a representationof human presence.
The only entrance to the site wherethis image was painted is a tiny,
narrow opening in the ceiling ofanother rock art site inside one of the
(21:16):
limestone towers.
It was discovered by one of ourIndonesian archeologists, Mr. Hamrrula,
or Ambu as his nickname is. And he'sa very experienced caver and climber,
and he was exploring this cave art sitethat had already already been known
before.
Mr. Hamrrula was monitoringthe condition of the art.
(21:36):
It was something he did regularly becausethe art is located quite close to a
cement production facility,
and there can be a lot of dust anddebris that might impact the art.
While he was doing that, he noticedthe tiny little opening in the ceiling.
And he thought, Ambu beingthe sort of guy he is,
I'm going to climb up there and see ifI can go in and see where it might lead
to. And he didn't have anyclimbing equipment on him.
(21:58):
So he literally climbedup a fig tree vine,
which was growing through all the holesin the rock high up the cliff face,
and it shoots down these sort ofrunner vines, like Tarzan style.
And he climbed up one of those andthen somehow managed to crawl across a
vertical rock face his very good climberand shimmed his way into this tiny
little hole.
And it was the opening to this largercave system located higher up in the cliff
(22:21):
face. Nowadays, there'sa very rickety ladder,
vertical ladder going up five or sixmeters that you have to climb up.
And even that makes me a little bitnervous. So once you get through this tiny
little opening and into thiscave art site, your heart racing,
you get up to the back of the cave,
and at the back of that caveis this incredible artwork,
which is about four or five meters wide.
(22:42):
And you look at what can only bedescribed as this very ancient story
being played out on thiswall depicting animals, pigs,
and dwarf bos being confrontedor hunted by these strange
little characters, these littlefigures that have human-like bodies,
but some body parts of animals. Okay,
(23:03):
so this is a very interesting partof this site, is that the people,
if you like doing the huntingof these animals, are human,
but also have qualities,visible body parts of animals.
For example,
one little figure has what seems tobe the head of a bird with this long
projecting beak. Another one ofthese little figures has a tail,
yet they're holding spears or ropes orsome sort of material culture objects
(23:27):
that they're using to hunt these animals.
So to look at that imageand then to try to work out
what it could have meantto these early people.
What was clear was thatthis painting told a story.
So this was essentially thefirst narrative pictorial record of a narrative that
we'd ever seen in the rock artin Maro. And it was stunning.
(23:49):
It just blew us away becausenarrative composition scenes,
if you like stories,
these are real storiesbeing told through pictures.
They were extremely rare in the Iceage heart in Europe, very, very rare,
extremely uncommon. So to findsomething like that in Southeast Asia,
it was very exciting.
And the scene was covered in the cavepopcorn, which gave them a way to date it.
(24:14):
And it was even earlier than anyof the other art they'd found.
44,000 Years ago thatart was there on that
wall when these little calcite popcorngrowth started to form on top of it.
And that's 44,000 years ago for anarrative scene at that time was
(24:34):
the earliest direct or indirectevidence for human storytelling that was
amazing. That was publishedin 2019 in Nature and again,
made the American Association forthe Advancement of Science's top 10
list, top 10 breakthroughs of theYear, which was really, really cool.
So in 2019 with this hunting scene,
they had found the oldest survivingimaginative creative story
(24:59):
frozen in time to befound 44,000 years later.
And then they found more another scene,
another story this time with threepigs that were dated to at least
45,500 years old.
And this one particularimage was just stunning,
just the most complete animalpainting I'd ever seen.
It's just this beautifulbig depiction of a pig.
(25:23):
And there was three individual pigs,
and they're interactingwith each other in some way.
One seems to be almostleaping over the other,
like maybe they were fighting or somesort of ritual interaction between these
animals possibly being capturedby these ancient human artists.
We collected a tiny popcorn sample fromover the rear foot of that complete pig.
And that brings us through to the currenttime when Adam's team made an even
(25:46):
more ancient discovery, yetanother painting from Maros,
the one we described atthe beginning of the story,
they dated it to atleast 51,200 years ago.
In this case,
we have a beautiful painting of a wartypig interacting with what seemed to be
three human-like figures. It'svery cryptic and enigmatic artwork,
(26:09):
which we don't quite know what theseancient people were trying to convey
through these motifs,
but it seems to be some sort of humananimal interaction being depicted in the
form of this story. And we justkeep finding more our colleagues,
Indonesian colleagues.This is another site,
this new one that was alsoWhatsApp to me. So yeah,
I check my iPhone frequently formessages from silhouettes whenever I'm
(26:32):
back in Australia because it, there'sjust so much more there to be found.
We're an incredible species,an extraordinary species,
and to try to understand the storyof how we got to be this way, to me,
it's something profound,
something that I take and my Indonesiancolleagues take very seriously.
(26:55):
Just this basic need to goout and explore the world
around us for traces of thehuman past and to try to
reconstruct or unravel this incrediblestory of who we are and how we got
here as humans. It's hard to describe.
You try to be a scientist and you tryto be detached and scholarly about it,
(27:19):
but you can't help but be drawn intothe minds of these early artists
and try to look at the world throughtheir eyes, the world that they lived in.
So to get that sort of insight intothe way that their mind worked and
their stories, their beliefs, their myths,
potentially it gives us a senseof who they are or who they were.
(27:39):
There's no one from that time totell us what these images meant,
but I dunno, it's thestories in my opinion.
That's how you understand apeople is by their stories.
Thank you so much.
No worries. That was great. Yeah.
(28:02):
Thank you to Adam Bromfor sharing his work.
You can find more about this discovery,
including pictures on ourwebsite@leakyfoundation.org.
You can also follow thelinks in your show notes.
Origin Stories is a projectof the Leaky Foundation,
a nonprofit dedicated to funding humanorigins research and sharing discoveries.
Like I said, at the top of the show,
(28:23):
we are nearing the end of ourquadruple Match challenge,
so please go to leakeyfoundation.org/origin stories,
and your donation will bequadruple matched. We really,
really appreciate your help.
This interview was recorded at Women'sAudio Mission in San Francisco.
Thank you to the wonderful people there.
This episode was produced by me andRay Pang Sound Design by Ray Pang.
(28:48):
Our editor is Audrey Quinn, andour theme music is by Henry Nagel.
Origin Stories is sponsoredby Jeannie Newman,
the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation,
and the Joan and ArnoldTravis Education Fund.
We'll be back next month with anothernew story. Thanks for listening.
This is Origin Stories, theLeaky Foundation podcast.
I'm Meredith Johnson.Before we get to the story,
I want to thank all of youfor supporting the show.
We're a donor-supported nonprofit,and every donation makes a difference.
We're getting close to the deadlinefor our quadruple-match challenge,
(00:21):
and we're short of our goal.
If we can raise $3,000 moreby the end of the month,
that's August 31st, we'll get$20,000 to help make origin stories.
So if you give $25 right now, we get $100.
We don't want to leave thischallenge money on the table,
(00:42):
so please go to leakyfoundation.org/originstories right now to make a donation.
Your gift will be quadruple-matched.Thank you so much for helping us out,
and thanks
for listening to the show.Now, here's our story.
One day more than 50,000years ago on what's now the
(01:06):
Indonesian Island of Sui,
someone climbed a towering rock formationto paint a picture on the ceiling
of a cave, almost 500 feet off the ground.
A picture that tells a storyusing a purplish red mineral
pigment, they painted mysterioushuman figures and a wild pig.
The Figures could be hunting this pigor they could be doing some sort of
(01:28):
ritual. The meaning is lost through time,
but it's clear that this picturehas meaning and action and a story.
This painting is now the oldest knownexample of visual storytelling in the
world,
and it's older than the figurativecave paintings of France and Spain.
It gives us a window into the worldand the minds of our ancient ancestors.
(01:51):
The discovery was just publishedin the Journal Nature this July,
and today on the show we'll hear thestory of these mysterious images,
where they were found, how scientistsdid the tricky work of dating them,
and what this art might tellus about human evolution,
human imagination and culture.
There are lots of archeologists that feela real human connection when they hold
(02:13):
a stone tool, for example, in their hand,
that maybe it's a sense ofconnection to those early people,
and it is obviously areflection into their minds.
But art is in a different league.
That's Adam Brum. Adam is aprofessor at Griffith University.
In Brisbane, which is thecapital of Queensland, Australia. I'm an archeologist.
(02:33):
Most of my work is based in Indonesia,
and I'm looking at the very earliesthuman settlement of that region.
Adam first went to Indonesia to tryto understand ancient hominins through
finding and studying fossilsand artifacts like stone tools.
He had no idea then, but the discoverieshe and his collaborators would make,
(02:56):
there would be about something evenmore uniquely human than tools.
Some of the first hominin fossils foundanywhere in the world were found in
Indonesia in 1891 on the island of Java.
These were the remains of ahomoerectus nicknamed Java Man,
(03:17):
and there's evidence that Homo erectuswas there from at least 1.2 million years
ago, maybe even as farback as 1.5 million.
And back then in the ice agewhen sea levels were lower,
Java wasn't an island like it is now.
It was part of an enormouscontinental landmass called Sunda.
So Java was essentially thevery southeastern tip of Asia,
(03:39):
and the fact that Javaman was there so long ago,
it makes sense his species couldhave made that journey on foot.
The real mystery is when they managedto get across from this continental
landmass onto these isolated islandsto the east in a region that we call
Wallia,
which is essentially a whole collectionof isolated oceanic islands that have
(03:59):
never had a direct terrestrial landconnection to this ice age landmass.
And then that's whenthings start to get very,
very interesting because we're talkinghominins crossing from a mainland across
major sea gaps to reachthese isolated islands.
The largest of theseisolated islands is Sulawesi,
and much of Adam's careerhas been focused there.
It's the 11th largest island in theworld with many plants and animals that
(04:23):
aren't found anywhere else.
Sulawesi is a fascinating island.It's a very vibrant place.
It it's quite a strangely shaped island.
It essentially consists ofa central mountainous core with a series of radiating
arm like peninsulas coming out of it.
Adam's first research on Sulawesi wasin the southern part of the island in a
(04:44):
region called Maros. It's made upof rural communities and villages,
and its dotted with dramatictowering rock formations that rose up
from the bottom of thesea millions of years ago.
These towers are formed out of purelimestone and from top to bottom,
they're just riddled withcaves and rock shelters,
(05:04):
and then at the outside of them are allclothed in dense tropical vegetation.
They literally look like towers thatemerge almost like dragon's teeth out of
flat countryside. That's allunder extensive rice cultivation.
It's some of the most stunning landscapescenery, I believe you can see,
and you just know there's just a hugeamount of evidence for ancient human life.
(05:26):
It's quite exhilarating.
With so many caves and rock shelters.
This area of Sulawesi alone could occupyarcheologists and paleoanthropologists
for several lifetimes.
(05:50):
Adam and his collaboratorsstarted work there in 2011,
looking for fossils and stone toolsto help piece together the early human
history of Sulawesi. This workdidn't go as they'd hoped,
but it set them on the path to makingsome of the biggest and most surprising
scientific discoveries of thatdecade and possibly this one too.
Initially,
we started excavating arock shelter called Liang
BorTong two, which means bird cave two.
(06:11):
The site was firstexcavated in the mid 1970s,
and it was pretty much the onlyknown ice age site on the island.
They re-excavated it in an attempt todig deeper and see what they could find.
So the original excavator had reachedabout three or four meters depth
in his archeological trench and hadfound evidence for humans at that
(06:34):
point in time,
stone tools dating to what he thoughtwas 30 to 40,000 years ago at that point.
And so we resolved to go deeper tosee how far back in time the human
occupation record might go there. Andthis being originally Mike Morwood's dig,
he was hoping to find somesort of Sulawesi Hobbits at the bottom of the trench,
but sadly, it was not to be.
(06:54):
We did manage to get about two or threemeters deeper than the 1970s trench,
but the technical problems withthat site are kind of legendary.
So as to exactly what we have,
what the stories are at that siteis a little bit still mysterious.
The site they re excavated was rightnear one of the first sites in Sulawesi,
(07:16):
where in the 1950s a Dutch archeologistnoticed the presence of rock art.
Simple painted images ofhands called hand stencils.
Hand stencils are these images ofhuman hands created by the person would
place the hand against,say the wall of the cave,
and then spray a mouthfulof paint around the hand.
And when they remove the hand,
there would be this negativeoutline left of the hand.
(07:39):
It's a very common art form foundin many prehistoric sites worldwide.
A few days after seeing the hand stencils,
one of the Dutch archeologists teammembers found a naturalistic painting of a
pig.
And then as they started to explore thewider area, there are caves everywhere,
they started to noticemore of this rock art.
I've known about the rock art for along time when I first started to work
(08:01):
Insisi in 2011,
but it was not really verywell known outside Indonesia.
It was assumed not to be particularly old.
So Adam was interested in the rock art,
and he was curious abouthow old this art could be,
but he didn't think it was part of theprehistoric puzzle he was working on.
My primary aim was todig deeper at that site,
(08:22):
but it was when we were taking daysoff on Sundays from the dig and sort of
wandering around exploring all this rockart in these caves that I noticed that
there could be a way to datethe art for the first time.
And then this led us off intothis whole new trajectory,
this whole new avenue of inquiry.
What did you notice?
(08:44):
Well, can I tell a story about, yeah,please tell me what happened that day.
It was in 2011,
the first season of this Stig inLiang Bong two, this cave site,
and we'd dig for six days a week, andon Sunday we would take a day off,
and one of my Indonesiancolleagues, Budianto Budi Hakim,
who's a legendary archeologist of SouthSulawes from the local Bugis community,
(09:09):
he knows all of the sites in that area,all the archeology sites in Maros.
And he told me about thisone site called Liang Jarre,
which is known as the Cave of theFingers. Literally translated.
This cave is known for itshand stencil paintings,
and some of them have thesecuriously pointed fingers.
So Mr. Budi invites him along to thesite and they go there with all their
(09:32):
Indonesian students.
Just as we're about towalk up to the site.
There was this huge torrential downpour.
We rushed into this local village wherethe people there looked after us and
took us into their house and fedus corn jagom which is a very
popular snack in South Sulawesi.
And so we're eating this roastedcorn waiting for the rain to stop.
(09:54):
And so I was wondering whatwe going to find in the site.
And so the corn itself isslightly significant here,
so bear that in mind. Anyway, soit stops raining after a while,
and we go up into this cave site,
and booty was trying to get meinterested in excavating the site itself.
As I explained earlier, we're havingsome difficulties at the main dig site,
but I looked at the site itself and Ithought, yeah, it's interesting to dig,
(10:17):
but we were too busy at theother site. As it turns out,
Budi excavated there later andfound a very important discovery,
so I was wrong about that.Anyway, but on this day,
we're looking at these hand stencils,exploring the site and looking around.
And then there was this one part ofthe wall, this limestone cave wall,
which had lots and lots ofthese images of human hands.
Scientists generally believe thesecouldn't have been more than a couple
(10:41):
thousand years old. And he's lookingat these paintings and again,
wondering how old could they be?
But then looking at oneseries of hand stencils,
I noticed these funny littlegrowths all over them.
They kind of looked a little bit likewhiteish gray warts or little bits
of cauliflower almost stuck to the topof these hand stencils. And in fact,
(11:02):
there were so many of them in some casesthat they almost completely obscured
these hand stencils.
The hand stencils themselves are madeout of this sort of reddish purplish
paint,
which usually stand out quite wellagainst the whiteish gray of the
limestone walls. But in some cases,
these little funny little growths werealmost completely blotting out these hand
(11:22):
stencils. I was thinking,what are these things?
I thought maybe there was some sortof microbial growths or something,
but they seem very, very hard.Okay, these little wartlike growths.
And I thought at thatstage that well, rock art,
it's very difficult to date,
but this could provide a means potentiallyof dating the artworks themselves.
(11:42):
Rock art paintings are typicallymade with minerals like ochre,
which is a natural earth pigment ochredoesn't have carbon scientists can use to
figure out dates, but these wartswere on top of the paintings,
so they had to have formedafter the paintings were made.
And Adam wondered if the little wartygrowths could be used as sort of a time
(12:03):
marker, because if youcould date the growths,
you would know that the art underneathwas at least as old as the growth that
had formed on top of it.
So he took a whole series of detailedphotos and he brought them back to
Australia.
At that time, I was sharing my officewith my colleague, Dr. Maxime Aubert Max.
He's a French Canadian, andthen he, funnily enough,
(12:26):
was probably the world's leadingexpert in rock art dating,
using a method at that time,known as uranium series analysis.
This is a method that measures theradioactive decay of uranium within things
like these growths on topof the rock art paintings,
and that decay can betranslated into time.
And if you're lucky enough to havesome of these little calcium carbonate
(12:47):
growths forming over the top of therock art, then using this method,
he was an expert inuranium series analysis.
You can infer an age for the artworksthemselves. So I was lucky enough,
it's just coincidence that he was in myoffice and I showed him images of these
little funny growths over the top ofthese hand stencils in the cave of fingers
in South Sil Oasis, and he wasvery excited. As soon as he saw it,
(13:09):
he tried to date enough rock art torealize that this was a big opportunity.
So he immediately said, yep,
I'm going to come over and take somesamples of those things first opportunity,
and we're going to try to date'em. And that's where it led to.
But the reason I initially mentionedcorn was there is a connection.
Those little growths turned out to bewhat Theologists referred to as oid spill
(13:30):
thas, or in the common term cave popcorn.
So yeah,
I've always thought there was a strangeconnection between eating that corn
before I went into the cave and thenfinding these cave popcorns all over this
art that eventually provided away for us to date it. So anyway,
it's a meaningful story to me. Yeah.
(13:52):
The next year, Maxime Aubert,the rock art dating expert,
came and took samples of cavepopcorn from several sites in Maros.
He took them back tothe lab and dated them.
They turned out to beunexpectedly old, incredibly old.
I wasn't really sure whatto expect. In hindsight,
we were digging a site that was 30 or40,000 years old in the same area where we
(14:15):
have this rock art.
So we knew that there were humansthere at a very early point in time,
and we were finding ochre,so mineral pigments,
the same pigments that wereprobably used to produce this art.
We were finding these pigments inthe archeological layers at 30,
40,000 years ago. So in hindsight,
I should have expected thatthat rock art would be very old,
(14:38):
but I didn't really knowwhat to expect, to be honest.
But it turned out to be incredibly old.
40,000 years old wasthe date of 40,000 for
a hand. Stansil was what max producedin those early days back 2012.
And that was incredibly exciting becausethat was by far the earliest evidence
we had anywhere outsideEurope really for rock art
(15:01):
production. So that was, at that time,
it was compatible in age with the earliestrock art known from France and Spain,
which was pretty unexpected and exciting.
So they had this very surprising,
very ancient rock art from thehumid tropical island of soi.
They had a very exciting date of 40,000years for a hand stencil painting,
(15:22):
but it was maybe a little too unexpectedfor some of the scientific journals at
the time.
We actually had some difficulty convincingat our esteemed colleagues through
the peer review process of thesignificance of the finding.
Adam figured it had something to do withthe simplicity of the paintings they'd
found, like sure,
they were similar in age to the veryold paintings found in France and Spain,
(15:46):
but they were just hand stencils,
not the mind blowing masterpiece,animal drawings of the European caves.
We had to find animal art, okay.
We had to find these early dates onsimilarly spectacular images of the animal
world, which the European,European artists justly famous for.
Ma did have animal art,
(16:07):
large naturalistic paintings of wild pigs,
and these small wild cattle calledAnoa. Those paintings were rare,
and the ones they found so fardidn't have the cave popcorn,
so they couldn't prove their age.
So we spent a lot of time exploring,
visiting every site that our Indonesianarcheologists colleagues knew about that
had animal art. And eventuallyat a site called Liang sang,
(16:31):
which is actually quite close toall the sites we'd been digging.
I went in there one day again withBudianto Hakim with Budi, Mr. Budi,
that means as the standard way ofreferring to people in Indonesia to blokes
to men. And I went into thesite with the famous Mr. Budi,
and there's lots of handstencils everywhere, as always,
(16:51):
lots of popcorn on the walls.
And I was looking up at theceiling getting a little bit dispirited because we'd
looked for this animal laugh for so long.And then I was looking at the ceiling,
and then I went, wait on inamongst all this cave popcorns,
it's called a dark smudge ceilingof this cave. I noticed this sort of
ghostly outline of what looked like apig. And I was like, what's going on here,
(17:13):
Budi? And he looked up and he thought, oh,
it's the first time I've seen that pigpainting. And I was like, oh, okay. Wow.
And then it was so hard to see becauseit was just covered with cave popcorn.
It was this painting of a pig,
maybe about a meter or ameter and a half in length,
and quite a simple portrayal.
But clearly you could see theanatomical fidelity in the outline,
(17:33):
depiction of this pigshown inside profile,
and it was covered with cave popcorn.And immediately I rang Max, my colleague,
who was out exploringother caves in that region.
Maxime Aubert was able to confirm thatthey now had animal paintings that were
at least 40,000 years old.
On the strength of that, weconvinced our colleagues,
we convinced the editor ofNature and it was published,
(17:55):
and the American Association forthe Advancement of Science deemed
that discovery to be one of the top 10breakthroughs of the year in any field of
scientific research that year.When we published it in 2014,
I think it was that animal artthat got us there. And so that's,
with that very long seguetakes me into the next phase of
(18:17):
our research in Maros, which hasreally been focused on this animal art.
Adam's archeology colleagues in Indonesiaexpanded their search for animal art.
They did years of intense surveying,
and they found hundreds of new rock artsites in a 450 kilometer square area.
For people listening in the US that's300 square miles about the size of New
(18:41):
York City. Through these searches,
they went from around 90 known rockart sites in the Morros area to over
600.
And there's still more. They'refinding scores of new sites every year.
This is just in areas that are surroundedby villages that people have lived in
for generations.
But you just keep finding more and moresites because the entrances to these
(19:04):
caves are almost impossibleto see from the ground.
They're clothed in dense vegetation.
You have to do some seriousclimbing and exploring.
A lot of the cave art sitesare located in high levels,
and you'll find rock art caves atleast 150 meters above the current
ground surface.
These ancient people went to a lot ofeffort to get up to the tops of these
towers to make this art probably forsome sort of ritual or symbolic purposes.
(19:28):
As the team continued to look, theycontinued to find more and more paintings.
When he wasn't in Sulawesi Adam's phonewas blowing up with updates from his
colleagues in Indonesia.
I'd be in my office in Brisbane,
and then I would be getting all theseWhatsApp messages with all these new
images, dozens of newsites with animal art
(19:49):
paintings of these wild pigs,
paintings of these wilddwarf buffalo, the owas,
and they just would blow me away. Andthen one day I received this one message,
I think it was just beforeChristmas in 2017, and my colleague,
who was an Indonesian rock art specialist,
(20:11):
Adhi Agus or as his nickname is,
and he was actually also a PhD studentof ours at Griffith at that time,
and he sent me this incredible WhatsAppimage of this new site that had just
been found in Maro in the verynorthern park called Leang Burang
four.
And I was just blown away. I mean,
(20:34):
they were quite fuzzy pixelated images,
but I could see that this was avery rare depiction of a dwarf
buffalo. And there was somesort of something else,
something more.
You can see what looked like theselittle lines emerging from the chest
area of this painting,of this dwarf buffalo,
(20:55):
which to me looked like they could bespears or something like that. All of.
The animal paintings they'd foundbefore had been just that animals,
but here was a representationof human presence.
The only entrance to the site wherethis image was painted is a tiny,
narrow opening in the ceiling ofanother rock art site inside one of the
(21:16):
limestone towers.
It was discovered by one of ourIndonesian archeologists, Mr. Hamrrula,
or Ambu as his nickname is. And he'sa very experienced caver and climber,
and he was exploring this cave art sitethat had already already been known
before.
Mr. Hamrrula was monitoringthe condition of the art.
(21:36):
It was something he did regularly becausethe art is located quite close to a
cement production facility,
and there can be a lot of dust anddebris that might impact the art.
While he was doing that, he noticedthe tiny little opening in the ceiling.
And he thought, Ambu beingthe sort of guy he is,
I'm going to climb up there and see ifI can go in and see where it might lead
to. And he didn't have anyclimbing equipment on him.
(21:58):
So he literally climbedup a fig tree vine,
which was growing through all the holesin the rock high up the cliff face,
and it shoots down these sort ofrunner vines, like Tarzan style.
And he climbed up one of those andthen somehow managed to crawl across a
vertical rock face his very good climberand shimmed his way into this tiny
little hole.
And it was the opening to this largercave system located higher up in the cliff
(22:21):
face. Nowadays, there'sa very rickety ladder,
vertical ladder going up five or sixmeters that you have to climb up.
And even that makes me a little bitnervous. So once you get through this tiny
little opening and into thiscave art site, your heart racing,
you get up to the back of the cave,
and at the back of that caveis this incredible artwork,
which is about four or five meters wide.
(22:42):
And you look at what can only bedescribed as this very ancient story
being played out on thiswall depicting animals, pigs,
and dwarf bos being confrontedor hunted by these strange
little characters, these littlefigures that have human-like bodies,
but some body parts of animals. Okay,
(23:03):
so this is a very interesting partof this site, is that the people,
if you like doing the huntingof these animals, are human,
but also have qualities,visible body parts of animals.
For example,
one little figure has what seems tobe the head of a bird with this long
projecting beak. Another one ofthese little figures has a tail,
yet they're holding spears or ropes orsome sort of material culture objects
(23:27):
that they're using to hunt these animals.
So to look at that imageand then to try to work out
what it could have meantto these early people.
What was clear was thatthis painting told a story.
So this was essentially thefirst narrative pictorial record of a narrative that
we'd ever seen in the rock artin Maro. And it was stunning.
(23:49):
It just blew us away becausenarrative composition scenes,
if you like stories,
these are real storiesbeing told through pictures.
They were extremely rare in the Iceage heart in Europe, very, very rare,
extremely uncommon. So to findsomething like that in Southeast Asia,
it was very exciting.
And the scene was covered in the cavepopcorn, which gave them a way to date it.
(24:14):
And it was even earlier than anyof the other art they'd found.
44,000 Years ago thatart was there on that
wall when these little calcite popcorngrowth started to form on top of it.
And that's 44,000 years ago for anarrative scene at that time was
(24:34):
the earliest direct or indirectevidence for human storytelling that was
amazing. That was publishedin 2019 in Nature and again,
made the American Association forthe Advancement of Science's top 10
list, top 10 breakthroughs of theYear, which was really, really cool.
So in 2019 with this hunting scene,
they had found the oldest survivingimaginative creative story
(24:59):
frozen in time to befound 44,000 years later.
And then they found more another scene,
another story this time with threepigs that were dated to at least
45,500 years old.
And this one particularimage was just stunning,
just the most complete animalpainting I'd ever seen.
It's just this beautifulbig depiction of a pig.
(25:23):
And there was three individual pigs,
and they're interactingwith each other in some way.
One seems to be almostleaping over the other,
like maybe they were fighting or somesort of ritual interaction between these
animals possibly being capturedby these ancient human artists.
We collected a tiny popcorn sample fromover the rear foot of that complete pig.
And that brings us through to the currenttime when Adam's team made an even
(25:46):
more ancient discovery, yetanother painting from Maros,
the one we described atthe beginning of the story,
they dated it to atleast 51,200 years ago.
In this case,
we have a beautiful painting of a wartypig interacting with what seemed to be
three human-like figures. It'svery cryptic and enigmatic artwork,
(26:09):
which we don't quite know what theseancient people were trying to convey
through these motifs,
but it seems to be some sort of humananimal interaction being depicted in the
form of this story. And we justkeep finding more our colleagues,
Indonesian colleagues.This is another site,
this new one that was alsoWhatsApp to me. So yeah,
I check my iPhone frequently formessages from silhouettes whenever I'm
(26:32):
back in Australia because it, there'sjust so much more there to be found.
We're an incredible species,an extraordinary species,
and to try to understand the storyof how we got to be this way, to me,
it's something profound,
something that I take and my Indonesiancolleagues take very seriously.
(26:55):
Just this basic need to goout and explore the world
around us for traces of thehuman past and to try to
reconstruct or unravel this incrediblestory of who we are and how we got
here as humans. It's hard to describe.
You try to be a scientist and you tryto be detached and scholarly about it,
(27:19):
but you can't help but be drawn intothe minds of these early artists
and try to look at the world throughtheir eyes, the world that they lived in.
So to get that sort of insight intothe way that their mind worked and
their stories, their beliefs, their myths,
potentially it gives us a senseof who they are or who they were.
(27:39):
There's no one from that time totell us what these images meant,
but I dunno, it's thestories in my opinion.
That's how you understand apeople is by their stories.
Thank you so much.
No worries. That was great. Yeah.
(28:02):
Thank you to Adam Bromfor sharing his work.
You can find more about this discovery,
including pictures on ourwebsite@leakyfoundation.org.
You can also follow thelinks in your show notes.
Origin Stories is a projectof the Leaky Foundation,
a nonprofit dedicated to funding humanorigins research and sharing discoveries.
Like I said, at the top of the show,
(28:23):
we are nearing the end of ourquadruple Match challenge,
so please go to leakeyfoundation.org/origin stories,
and your donation will bequadruple matched. We really,
really appreciate your help.
This interview was recorded at Women'sAudio Mission in San Francisco.
Thank you to the wonderful people there.
This episode was produced by me andRay Pang Sound Design by Ray Pang.
(28:48):
Our editor is Audrey Quinn, andour theme music is by Henry Nagel.
Origin Stories is sponsoredby Jeannie Newman,
the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation,
and the Joan and ArnoldTravis Education Fund.
We'll be back next month with anothernew story. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.