This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

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Now, here's our story.

One day more than 50,000 years ago on what's now the Indonesian Island of Sui, someone climbed a towering rock formation to paint a picture on the ceiling of a cave, almost 500 feet off the ground.

A picture that tells a story using a purplish red mineral pigment, they painted mysterious human figures and a wild pig.

The Figures could be hunting this pig or they could be doing some sort of ritual.

The meaning is lost through time, but it's clear that this picture has meaning and action and a story.

This painting is now the oldest known example of visual storytelling in the world, and it's older than the figurative cave paintings of France and Spain.

It gives us a window into the world and the minds of our ancient ancestors.

The discovery was just published in the Journal Nature this July, and today on the show we'll hear the story of these mysterious images, where they were found, how scientists did the tricky work of dating them, and what this art might tell us about human evolution, human imagination and culture.

There are lots of archeologists that feel a real human connection when they hold a stone tool, for example, in their hand, that maybe it's a sense of connection to those early people, and it is obviously a reflection into their minds.

But art is in a different league.

That's Adam Brum.

Adam is a professor at Griffith University.

In Brisbane, which is the capital of Queensland, Australia.

I'm an archeologist.

Most of my work is based in Indonesia, and I'm looking at the very earliest human settlement of that region.

Adam first went to Indonesia to try to understand ancient hominins through finding and studying fossils and artifacts like stone tools.

He had no idea then, but the discoveries he and his collaborators would make, there would be about something even more uniquely human than tools.

Some of the first hominin fossils found anywhere in the world were found in Indonesia in 1891 on the island of Java.

These were the remains of a homoerectus nicknamed Java Man, and there's evidence that Homo erectus was there from at least 1.2 million years ago, maybe even as far back as 1.5 million.

And back then in the ice age when sea levels were lower, Java wasn't an island like it is now.

It was part of an enormous continental landmass called Sunda.

So Java was essentially the very southeastern tip of Asia, and the fact that Java man was there so long ago, it makes sense his species could have made that journey on foot.

The real mystery is when they managed to get across from this continental landmass onto these isolated islands to the east in a region that we call Wallia, which is essentially a whole collection of isolated oceanic islands that have never had a direct terrestrial land connection to this ice age landmass.

And then that's when things start to get very, very interesting because we're talking hominins crossing from a mainland across major sea gaps to reach these isolated islands.

The largest of these isolated islands is Sulawesi, and much of Adam's career has been focused there.

It's the 11th largest island in the world with many plants and animals that 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 of a central mountainous core with a series of radiating arm like peninsulas coming out of it.

Adam's first research on Sulawesi was in the southern part of the island in a region called Maros.

It's made up of rural communities and villages, and its dotted with dramatic towering rock formations that rose up from the bottom of the sea millions of years ago.

These towers are formed out of pure limestone and from top to bottom, they're just riddled with caves and rock shelters, and then at the outside of them are all clothed in dense tropical vegetation.

They literally look like towers that emerge almost like dragon's teeth out of flat countryside.

That's all under extensive rice cultivation.

It's some of the most stunning landscape scenery, I believe you can see, and you just know there's just a huge amount of evidence for ancient human life.

It's quite exhilarating.

With so many caves and rock shelters.

This area of Sulawesi alone could occupy archeologists and paleoanthropologists for several lifetimes.

Adam and his collaborators started work there in 2011, looking for fossils and stone tools to help piece together the early human history of Sulawesi.

This work didn't go as they'd hoped, but it set them on the path to making some of the biggest and most surprising scientific discoveries of that decade and possibly this one too.

Initially, we started excavating a rock shelter called Liang BorTong two, which means bird cave two.

The site was first excavated in the mid 1970s, and it was pretty much the only known ice age site on the island.

They re-excavated it in an attempt to dig deeper and see what they could find.

So the original excavator had reached about three or four meters depth in his archeological trench and had found evidence for humans at that point in time, stone tools dating to what he thought was 30 to 40,000 years ago at that point.

And so we resolved to go deeper to see how far back in time the human occupation record might go there.

And this being originally Mike Morwood's dig, he was hoping to find some sort of Sulawesi Hobbits at the bottom of the trench, but sadly, it was not to be.

We did manage to get about two or three meters deeper than the 1970s trench, but the technical problems with that site are kind of legendary.

So as to exactly what we have, what the stories are at that site is a little bit still mysterious.

The site they re excavated was right near one of the first sites in Sulawesi, where in the 1950s a Dutch archeologist noticed the presence of rock art.

Simple painted images of hands called hand stencils.

Hand stencils are these images of human hands created by the person would place the hand against, say the wall of the cave, and then spray a mouthful of paint around the hand.

And when they remove the hand, there would be this negative outline left of the hand.

It's a very common art form found in many prehistoric sites worldwide.

A few days after seeing the hand stencils, one of the Dutch archeologists team members found a naturalistic painting of a pig.

And then as they started to explore the wider area, there are caves everywhere, they started to notice more of this rock art.

I've known about the rock art for a long time when I first started to work Insisi in 2011, but it was not really very well known outside Indonesia.

It was assumed not to be particularly old.

So Adam was interested in the rock art, and he was curious about how old this art could be, but he didn't think it was part of the prehistoric puzzle he was working on.

My primary aim was to dig deeper at that site, but it was when we were taking days off on Sundays from the dig and sort of wandering around exploring all this rock art in these caves that I noticed that there could be a way to date the art for the first time.

And then this led us off into this whole new trajectory, this whole new avenue of inquiry.

What did you notice?

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 in Liang Bong two, this cave site, and we'd dig for six days a week, and on Sunday we would take a day off, and one of my Indonesian colleagues, Budianto Budi Hakim, who's a legendary archeologist of South Sulawes from the local Bugis community, he knows all of the sites in that area, all the archeology sites in Maros.

And he told me about this one site called Liang Jarre, which is known as the Cave of the Fingers.

Literally translated.

This cave is known for its hand stencil paintings, and some of them have these curiously pointed fingers.

So Mr.

Budi invites him along to the site and they go there with all their Indonesian students.

Just as we're about to walk up to the site.

There was this huge torrential downpour.

We rushed into this local village where the people there looked after us and took us into their house and fed us corn jagom which is a very popular snack in South Sulawesi.

And so we're eating this roasted corn waiting for the rain to stop.

And so I was wondering what we going to find in the site.

And so the corn itself is slightly significant here, so bear that in mind.

Anyway, so it stops raining after a while, and we go up into this cave site, and booty was trying to get me interested in excavating the site itself.

As I explained earlier, we're having some difficulties at the main dig site, but I looked at the site itself and I thought, yeah, it's interesting to dig, but we were too busy at the other site.

As it turns out, Budi excavated there later and found 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 of the wall, this limestone cave wall, which had lots and lots of these images of human hands.

Scientists generally believe these couldn't have been more than a couple thousand years old.

And he's looking at these paintings and again, wondering how old could they be?

But then looking at one series of hand stencils, I noticed these funny little growths all over them.

They kind of looked a little bit like whiteish gray warts or little bits of cauliflower almost stuck to the top of these hand stencils.

And in fact, there were so many of them in some cases that they almost completely obscured these hand stencils.

The hand stencils themselves are made out of this sort of reddish purplish paint, which usually stand out quite well against the whiteish gray of the limestone walls.

But in some cases, these little funny little growths were almost completely blotting out these hand stencils.

I was thinking, what are these things?

I thought maybe there was some sort of microbial growths or something, but they seem very, very hard.

Okay, these little wartlike growths.

And I thought at that stage that well, rock art, it's very difficult to date, but this could provide a means potentially of dating the artworks themselves.

Rock art paintings are typically made with minerals like ochre, which is a natural earth pigment ochre doesn't have carbon scientists can use to figure out dates, but these warts were on top of the paintings, so they had to have formed after the paintings were made.

And Adam wondered if the little warty growths could be used as sort of a time marker, because if you could date the growths, you would know that the art underneath was at least as old as the growth that had formed on top of it.

So he took a whole series of detailed photos and he brought them back to Australia.

At that time, I was sharing my office with my colleague, Dr.

Maxime Aubert Max.

He's a French Canadian, and then he, funnily enough, was probably the world's leading expert in rock art dating, using a method at that time, known as uranium series analysis.

This is a method that measures the radioactive decay of uranium within things like these growths on top of the rock art paintings, and that decay can be translated into time.

And if you're lucky enough to have some of these little calcium carbonate growths forming over the top of the rock art, then using this method, he was an expert in uranium series analysis.

You can infer an age for the artworks themselves.

So I was lucky enough, it's just coincidence that he was in my office and I showed him images of these little funny growths over the top of these hand stencils in the cave of fingers in South Sil Oasis, and he was very excited.

As soon as he saw it, he tried to date enough rock art to realize that this was a big opportunity.

So he immediately said, yep, I'm going to come over and take some samples 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 mentioned corn was there is a connection.

Those little growths turned out to be what Theologists referred to as oid spill thas, or in the common term cave popcorn.

So yeah, I've always thought there was a strange connection between eating that corn before I went into the cave and then finding these cave popcorns all over this art that eventually provided a way for us to date it.

So anyway, it's a meaningful story to me.

Yeah.

The next year, Maxime Aubert, the rock art dating expert, came and took samples of cave popcorn from several sites in Maros.

He took them back to the lab and dated them.

They turned out to be unexpectedly old, incredibly old.

I wasn't really sure what to expect.

In hindsight, we were digging a site that was 30 or 40,000 years old in the same area where we have this rock art.

So we knew that there were humans there at a very early point in time, and we were finding ochre, so mineral pigments, the same pigments that were probably used to produce this art.

We were finding these pigments in the archeological layers at 30, 40,000 years ago.

So in hindsight, I should have expected that that rock art would be very old, but I didn't really know what to expect, to be honest.

But it turned out to be incredibly old.

40,000 years old was the date of 40,000 for a hand.

Stansil was what max produced in those early days back 2012.

And that was incredibly exciting because that was by far the earliest evidence we had anywhere outside Europe really for rock art production.

So that was, at that time, it was compatible in age with the earliest rock art known from France and Spain, which was pretty unexpected and exciting.

So they had this very surprising, very ancient rock art from the humid tropical island of soi.

They had a very exciting date of 40,000 years for a hand stencil painting, but it was maybe a little too unexpected for some of the scientific journals at the time.

We actually had some difficulty convincing at our esteemed colleagues through the peer review process of the significance of the finding.

Adam figured it had something to do with the simplicity of the paintings they'd found, like sure, they were similar in age to the very old paintings found in France and Spain, 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 on similarly spectacular images of the animal world, which the European, European artists justly famous for.

Ma did have animal art, large naturalistic paintings of wild pigs, and these small wild cattle called Anoa.

Those paintings were rare, and the ones they found so far didn'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 Indonesian archeologists colleagues knew about that had animal art.

And eventually at a site called Liang sang, which is actually quite close to all the sites we'd been digging.

I went in there one day again with Budianto Hakim with Budi, Mr.

Budi, that means as the standard way of referring to people in Indonesia to blokes to men.

And I went into the site with the famous Mr.

Budi, and there's lots of hand stencils everywhere, as always, lots of popcorn on the walls.

And I was looking up at the ceiling 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 in amongst all this cave popcorns, it's called a dark smudge ceiling of this cave.

I noticed this sort of ghostly outline of what looked like a pig.

And I was like, what's going on here, Budi?

And he looked up and he thought, oh, it's the first time I've seen that pig painting.

And I was like, oh, okay.

Wow.

And then it was so hard to see because it was just covered with cave popcorn.

It was this painting of a pig, maybe about a meter or a meter and a half in length, and quite a simple portrayal.

But clearly you could see the anatomical fidelity in the outline, depiction of this pig shown inside profile, and it was covered with cave popcorn.

And immediately I rang Max, my colleague, who was out exploring other caves in that region.

Maxime Aubert was able to confirm that they now had animal paintings that were at least 40,000 years old.

On the strength of that, we convinced our colleagues, we convinced the editor of Nature and it was published, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science deemed that discovery to be one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year in any field of scientific research that year.

When we published it in 2014, I think it was that animal art that got us there.

And so that's, with that very long segue takes me into the next phase of our research in Maros, which has really been focused on this animal art.

Adam's archeology colleagues in Indonesia expanded their search for animal art.

They did years of intense surveying, and they found hundreds of new rock art sites in a 450 kilometer square area.

For people listening in the US that's 300 square miles about the size of New York City.

Through these searches, they went from around 90 known rock art sites in the Morros area to over 600.

And there's still more.

They're finding scores of new sites every year.

This is just in areas that are surrounded by villages that people have lived in for generations.

But you just keep finding more and more sites because the entrances to these caves are almost impossible to see from the ground.

They're clothed in dense vegetation.

You have to do some serious climbing and exploring.

A lot of the cave art sites are located in high levels, and you'll find rock art caves at least 150 meters above the current ground surface.

These ancient people went to a lot of effort to get up to the tops of these towers to make this art probably for some sort of ritual or symbolic purposes.

As the team continued to look, they continued to find more and more paintings.

When he wasn't in Sulawesi Adam's phone was blowing up with updates from his colleagues in Indonesia.

I'd be in my office in Brisbane, and then I would be getting all these WhatsApp messages with all these new images, dozens of new sites with animal art paintings of these wild pigs, paintings of these wild dwarf buffalo, the owas, and they just would blow me away.

And then one day I received this one message, I think it was just before Christmas in 2017, and my colleague, who was an Indonesian rock art specialist, Adhi Agus or as his nickname is, and he was actually also a PhD student of ours at Griffith at that time, and he sent me this incredible WhatsApp image of this new site that had just been found in Maro in the very northern park called Leang Burang four.

And I was just blown away.

I mean, they were quite fuzzy pixelated images, but I could see that this was a very rare depiction of a dwarf buffalo.

And there was some sort of something else, something more.

You can see what looked like these little lines emerging from the chest area of this painting, of this dwarf buffalo, which to me looked like they could be spears or something like that.

All of.

The animal paintings they'd found before had been just that animals, but here was a representation of human presence.

The only entrance to the site where this image was painted is a tiny, narrow opening in the ceiling of another rock art site inside one of the limestone towers.

It was discovered by one of our Indonesian archeologists, Mr.

Hamrrula, or Ambu as his nickname is.

And he's a very experienced caver and climber, and he was exploring this cave art site that had already already been known before.

Mr.

Hamrrula was monitoring the condition of the art.

It was something he did regularly because the art is located quite close to a cement production facility, and there can be a lot of dust and debris that might impact the art.

While he was doing that, he noticed the tiny little opening in the ceiling.

And he thought, Ambu being the sort of guy he is, I'm going to climb up there and see if I can go in and see where it might lead to.

And he didn't have any climbing equipment on him.

So he literally climbed up a fig tree vine, which was growing through all the holes in the rock high up the cliff face, and it shoots down these sort of runner vines, like Tarzan style.

And he climbed up one of those and then somehow managed to crawl across a vertical rock face his very good climber and shimmed his way into this tiny little hole.

And it was the opening to this larger cave system located higher up in the cliff face.

Nowadays, there's a very rickety ladder, vertical ladder going up five or six meters that you have to climb up.

And even that makes me a little bit nervous.

So once you get through this tiny little opening and into this cave art site, your heart racing, you get up to the back of the cave, and at the back of that cave is this incredible artwork, which is about four or five meters wide.

And you look at what can only be described as this very ancient story being played out on this wall depicting animals, pigs, and dwarf bos being confronted or hunted by these strange little characters, these little figures that have human-like bodies, but some body parts of animals.

Okay, so this is a very interesting part of this site, is that the people, if you like doing the hunting of these animals, are human, but also have qualities, visible body parts of animals.

For example, one little figure has what seems to be the head of a bird with this long projecting beak.

Another one of these little figures has a tail, yet they're holding spears or ropes or some sort of material culture objects that they're using to hunt these animals.

So to look at that image and then to try to work out what it could have meant to these early people.

What was clear was that this painting told a story.

So this was essentially the first narrative pictorial record of a narrative that we'd ever seen in the rock art in Maro.

And it was stunning.

It just blew us away because narrative composition scenes, if you like stories, these are real stories being told through pictures.

They were extremely rare in the Ice age heart in Europe, very, very rare, extremely uncommon.

So to find something like that in Southeast Asia, it was very exciting.

And the scene was covered in the cave popcorn, which gave them a way to date it.

And it was even earlier than any of the other art they'd found.

44,000 Years ago that art was there on that wall when these little calcite popcorn growth started to form on top of it.

And that's 44,000 years ago for a narrative scene at that time was the earliest direct or indirect evidence for human storytelling that was amazing.

That was published in 2019 in Nature and again, made the American Association for the Advancement of Science's top 10 list, top 10 breakthroughs of the Year, which was really, really cool.

So in 2019 with this hunting scene, they had found the oldest surviving imaginative creative story frozen in time to be found 44,000 years later.

And then they found more another scene, another story this time with three pigs that were dated to at least 45,500 years old.

And this one particular image was just stunning, just the most complete animal painting I'd ever seen.

It's just this beautiful big depiction of a pig.

And there was three individual pigs, and they're interacting with each other in some way.

One seems to be almost leaping over the other, like maybe they were fighting or some sort of ritual interaction between these animals possibly being captured by these ancient human artists.

We collected a tiny popcorn sample from over the rear foot of that complete pig.

And that brings us through to the current time when Adam's team made an even more ancient discovery, yet another painting from Maros, the one we described at the beginning of the story, they dated it to at least 51,200 years ago.

In this case, we have a beautiful painting of a warty pig interacting with what seemed to be three human-like figures.

It's very cryptic and enigmatic artwork, which we don't quite know what these ancient people were trying to convey through these motifs, but it seems to be some sort of human animal interaction being depicted in the form of this story.

And we just keep finding more our colleagues, Indonesian colleagues.

This is another site, this new one that was also WhatsApp to me.

So yeah, I check my iPhone frequently for messages from silhouettes whenever I'm back in Australia because it, there's just so much more there to be found.

We're an incredible species, an extraordinary species, and to try to understand the story of how we got to be this way, to me, it's something profound, something that I take and my Indonesian colleagues take very seriously.

Just this basic need to go out and explore the world around us for traces of the human past and to try to reconstruct or unravel this incredible story of who we are and how we got here as humans.

It's hard to describe.

You try to be a scientist and you try to be detached and scholarly about it, but you can't help but be drawn into the minds of these early artists and try to look at the world through their eyes, the world that they lived in.

So to get that sort of insight into the way that their mind worked and their stories, their beliefs, their myths, potentially it gives us a sense of who they are or who they were.

There's no one from that time to tell us what these images meant, but I dunno, it's the stories in my opinion.

That's how you understand a people is by their stories.

Thank you so much.

No worries.

That was great.

Yeah.

Thank you to Adam Brom for sharing his work.

You can find more about this discovery, including pictures on our website@leakyfoundation.org.

You can also follow the links in your show notes.

Origin Stories is a project of the Leaky Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries.

Like I said, at the top of the show, we are nearing the end of our quadruple Match challenge, so please go to leakey foundation.org/origin stories, and your donation will be quadruple matched.

We really, really appreciate your help.

This interview was recorded at Women's Audio Mission in San Francisco.

Thank you to the wonderful people there.

This episode was produced by me and Ray Pang Sound Design by Ray Pang.

Our editor is Audrey Quinn, and our theme music is by Henry Nagel.

Origin Stories is sponsored by Jeannie Newman, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.

We'll be back next month with another new story.

Thanks for listening.