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Warty Pig Is The Oldest Animal Cave Art
Live Science
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yesterday
A 45,500-year-old warty pig drawing is the oldest known cave painting of an animal on record. The piggies were painted in Indonesian caves.
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00:00
The oldest rock art of an animal on record is a very hairy and warty pig
00:05
found in an Indonesian cave that dates back to 45,500 years ago.
00:14
The pig itself is actually quite large. It measures four and a half feet or 136 centimeters in length,
00:21
and it has the outline of two human handprints by its rump. Here's a brighter image of it,
00:26
created with the computer program called decoloration stretch or destretch,
00:30
which is often used to study and digitally enhance rock art. The entire panel shows this large pig
00:36
facing two or three other pigs, and they're having some kind of social interaction. What's with all
00:41
these warty pigs? It turns out that these wild animals, known as Sulawasi warty pigs, are native
00:48
to the island of Sulawasi, and they were hunted by the ancient people who lived here and were even
00:53
domesticated by them. It seems clear that early humans interacted closely with this pig on various
00:59
levels for a very long period of time. In fact, the Ice Age artists of Sulawasi almost seem to
01:05
have been obsessed with these warty pigs, which is perhaps not surprising given their economic
01:09
importance, according to Adam Bram, the study's lead researcher and an archaeologist at the Australian
01:14
Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University. After finding these warty pig drawings
01:19
in limestone caves, the scientists figured out how old they were using uranium series dating.
01:25
Basically, when rainwater seeps through a limestone cave, a tiny bit of uranium from the environment
01:32
dissolves in the water. Over time, this dripping forms a mineral known as calcite that grows on the cave
01:38
walls. That's exactly what happened here. Some calcite with the radioactive element uranium grew over
01:45
part of the cave art, so the scientists chipped away a few samples of calcite and measured the
01:49
radioactive decay. Essentially, uranium decays into thorium, so they measured the ratio of uranium to
01:56
thorium in each sample. In the end, they determined that the pig painting was at least 45,500 years old.
02:02
However, outside researchers noted there were a few technical difficulties of the uranium-thorium dating
02:08
in the study, so the date is more of a rough estimate than an exact date. But given that there's a lot of
02:13
other rock art in Indonesia and on Sulawesi Island, including a warty pig drawing in another cave that's
02:19
at least 43,900 years old, the new study provides more evidence that Indonesia was an early hotspot for rock art.
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