The oldest known figurative cave art painting in the world may be a 40,000-year-old rendering of a species of wild cattle found in a Borneo cave by a group of Griffith University researchers.
It is considerably older than a 35,400-year-old pig-deer painting discovered by the same team a few years ago in a cave located on Sulawesi, another island in Indonesia.
These recent Indonesian cave art discoveries are significant because they essentially rewrite the history of art and human cultural achievement. Until a few years ago, it was believed that Europe was home to the oldest figurative works, artwork that clearly depicts something from the real world. The revelation that a Palaeolithic rock art tradition was established in Indonesia at least 40,000 years ago challenges the long-held belief that Europe was the cradle of early artistic creativity. Rather, ice age artists in Indonesia were creating figurative art at the same time their European counterparts were doing so, 8,000 miles away.
