A fat, red pig flanked by three human figures: the image was painted more than 51,000 years ago on a cave wall in Indonesia and is believed to be the oldest work of performance art in the world.

This plan, although simple, “clearly tells a story, which constitutes the earliest evidence of a narrative“, as it is much older than the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in France, explained in a press conference given by archaeologist Adam Broom, one of the authors of the study published today in the scientific journal Nature.

The previous record was held by a hunting scene found by the same team of researchers in 2019, also in an Indonesian cave.

At the time, they estimated (incorrectly) that it was about 44,000 years old.

With the recent discovery, in the neighboring Maros-Pangep cave, in Kelevi, “we pass the 50,000 year mark for the first time“, said archaeologist Maxime Obert, of Griffith University in Australia.

The fact that the first representatives of the human species managed to tell such a “complex” story through art could mean that we should rethink how we understand the intellectual evolution of Homo sapiens, he added.

To date the work the researchers resorted to a new method that uses lasers and software that recreates the “map» of the rock.

The technique is more accurate, easier, faster and cheaper, and requires much smaller rock samples than the previous method, Obert explained.

It does not date the painting directly but the various layers of metallic elements that have accumulated over time. To test the new technique, the researchers applied it to the petroglyph that previously held the record: they found it to be at least 48,000 years old, 4,000 years older than they thought in 2019.

They then tested the laser method on an undated image found in 2017 at Kelevi. Conclusion: it was at least 51,200 years old.

The red painting, which is in poor condition, depicts three faces around a wild boar. It is difficult for scientists to understand the meaning of these images, which nevertheless seem to describe an act, unlike the enigmatic “well scene” of Lascaux (21,000 years old), where a man with a bird’s head is overthrown by a bison.

Maxime Obert hypothesizes that the painting is likely the work of early humans who crossed Southeast Asia and then reached Australia, around 65,000 years ago. “It may be a matter of time before we find older specimens,” he commented.

The oldest hand-painted designs known today are simple lines and patterns found in South Africa and estimated to be 100,000 years old. Exists “a huge gap” between this first “work of art” and the cave paintings of Indonesia, observed Maxime Obert.

Before the discoveries in Indonesia archaeologists believed that the first “narratives’ images appeared in Western Europe, such as the 40,000-year-old statuette of a man with a lion’s head found in Germany.