What was the first “art”? Howwould we know?Recently discovered cave paintings and bone carvings offer new perspectives on long-heldquestions about art’s origins—not to mention the nature of art itself.

Amy McDermott, Science Writer

Archaeologist Adam Brumm recalls the moment inlate 2017 when his phone buzzed with a WhatsAppmessage that included a rather astounding image:three little pigs leaping across the limestone walls ofLeang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island ofSulawesi.

It was a few months after the field season, andBrumm sat in his office at Griffith University in Bris-bane, Australia. His field team had remained in

Indonesia. Their notes to him that afternoon werenonchalant, Brumm recalls, along the lines of “Oh bythe way, we found this spectacular cave painting.”He was quickly scrolling through the messages on hisiPhone, when he saw the first images of the pigs flashby on his screen. “I nearly had a heart attack,”Brumm says. “They were absolutely incredible. Ireplied, at 3:58 pm: ‘Holy hell!!!!! Amazing pigpaintings!!!’” At least 45,500 years ago, a human

Researchers believe this 45,500-year-old Indonesian cave painting, apparently of a pig, is the oldest known depiction of the animal world.It’s among several recently unearthed prehistoric images that are shedding new light on the dawn of art. Image credit: Maxime Aubert (Grif-fith University, Nathan QLD, Australia).

Published under the PNAS license.

Published October 27, 2021.

PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 44 e2117561118 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118 j 1 of 5

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hand had painted the pigs in ochre, making them theoldest known examples of figurative art by at leastseveral thousand years—and, by some standards, theoldest artwork in the world (1).

But which painting, drawing, or carving deservesthe superlative “oldest” is debatable. The monikerdepends, in part, on how archaeologists define artitself. The Sulawesi pigs are certainly the oldest knownfigurative, or representational, art. That entails workdepicting objects from life, Brumm explains, such thatan average observer would glance at the paintingsand recognize them as pigs rather than abstractions.Representational art is common in art history, fromGreek Hellenistic marble goddesses to First Nationsmasks of killer whales and ravens in the Americas.

And then there’s nonfigurative, or nonrepresenta-tional, expression. Examples abound in modern art,from Mark Rothko’s color blocks on canvas to AnneTruitt’s colorful minimalist pillars. The earliest abstractmarkings appear hundreds of thousands of years ear-lier than the Sulawesi pigs, when humans and otherhominids began etching parallel lines, grids, andcircles into shell and bone. But archaeologists dis-agree as to whether these are in fact the earliestglimmers of artistic expression.

Recent discoveries of both figurative and abstractimages, including 51,000-year-old etchings in bonemade by Neanderthals in Germany, are promptingresearchers and others to ask the question: When didart truly arise, and in what species? Adding to thearchaeological evidence are modern day cognitiveexperiments using photographs of ancient line carv-ings. The work could help researchers recognizewhether the carvings were originally intended as“art”—images and etchings purposefully created tostimulate the visual senses.

By Hand and Firelight“There’s a big problem in studying Paleolithic art, inthat we don’t know what art is,” confesses evolutionarycognitive archaeologist Dietrich Stout at Emory Univer-sity in Atlanta, GA. When amateur archaeologist Mar-celino Sanz de Sautuola stumbled across the firstgallery of cave paintings at Altamira, Spain, a discoveryhe published in 1880, archaeologists assumed that theart was forged (2). Even decades later, when the paint-ings were dated to a minimum of 13,500 years ago,Stout says that researchers didn’t spend much time ondefinitions of art; the sense was, “you know it whenyou see it.” Here were paintings requiring technicalskill, a range of materials, and probably torchlight forthe artists to see while painting. And they looked likepaintings a 19th century European gallery would dis-play, heavily favoring the figurative over the abstract.

All this suggested to early archaeologists thatEuropean cave painters must have been cognitively

The large limestone cave known as Leang Tedongnge is nestled in a valley onthe Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The “three little pigs” painted there leapacross a back wall in what appears to be a depiction of some social interaction,perhaps mating or fighting. Image credit: Ratno Sardi (photographer).

This engraved giant deer bone, made by Neanderthals and found at a cave site in Germany, suggests that the origins of art are earlier thanmany contend. Image credit: Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage/Volker Minkus (photographer).

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fully modern, undergoing an abrupt leap from crudeto relatively sophisticated, which allowed them totake images from the real world, held in the mind’seye, and then create a physical representation ofthose images by using lines on rock. Despite a lack ofdirect evidence, archaeologists at the time assumedthese artists must have had all kinds of other“modern” characteristics as well, such as language,culture, abstract thought, and religion, Stoutexplains. Art, as those early archaeologists imaginedit, came out of a creative revolution coinciding withthe earliest European cave paintings, dated to about30,000 years ago at their oldest in Chauvet, France.

But these would turn out to be hasty conclu-sions. “That’s a problematic concept,” Stout says,noting that brain size hasn’t changed much forHomo sapiens in the last 500,000 years. Also,plenty of modern cultures make both figurativeand abstract art. So there’s no good reason toassume that European figurative artworks are evi-dence of a cognitive leap that enabled art-making,as opposed to simply heralding the arrival of newgroups in Europe that showed up with representa-tional artistic skills. “I’d say the key point is that theidea of a ‘revolution’ was an artifact of looking onlyat the archaeological record of Europe,” he says.Indications of migration in Europe had created animpression of sudden revolutionary change, whichis now known to be more gradual elsewhere.“Around the world today we see lots of diversity inthe expression of ‘art’ by modern Homo sapiens,”he explains. “There is no real reason anymore tosee figurative art as a key indicator of a broaderpackage of ‘modern’ traits.”

Today, Stout sees several different camps inarchaeology, adhering to slightly different defini-tions—all of which get to the heart of a decidedlymodern-day conundrum: What is art? The most com-mon criterion for what’s considered art is behaviorwithout any apparent practical use. Take the red pig-ment ochre, for instance, which humans used to paintthe Sulawesi pigs. The pigment, also found at oldersites pre-dating figurative art, may have been usedartistically as face paint or other body ornamentation,but that’s hard to prove. Ochre also has practicaluses, for example in processing animal hides. Stillother archaeologists would like to see stronger evi-dence that the art was actually intended to conveysome kind of aesthetic principle or meaning, Stoutnotes. Beads, for instance, are decorative but canalso signal group identity. But again, it’s hard to ruleout practical uses.

Still, there are some growing areas of agreement.The notion that modern human art began in Europesome 40,000 years ago has been “a crumblingedifice,” Brumm notes. The Sulawesi pigs firmlyusher it out; the figures are representational and pre-date any equivalent figurative depiction in Europeeasily by 5,000 years, he adds. And the pigs may noteven be the oldest figurative art. Cave scenes ofhunter-gatherer life from India to China could possi-bly be even older.

One big challenge, Brumm says, is that most cavepaintings are difficult to date. In Indonesia, for exam-ple, archaeologists first reported cave paintings inthe same region as Leang Tedongnge in the 1950s,created by blowing a mouthful of pigment around anoutstretched hand, pressed to a cave wall. Theassumption until recently was that the hand stencilscouldn’t be very old, Brumm says, because Indonesiais so hot and humid. The paint should quickly erode.

But in 2011, Brumm and colleagues noticedpopcorn-shaped growths formed over the top ofsome Indonesian paintings in limestone caves, whichwould have formed sometime after the paintingsappeared. The growths turned out to be precipitatedcalcite deposits, similar to stalactites, which build upin hundreds of hardened layers over centuries. Bymeasuring the ratio of uranium to a product of itsdecay, thorium, Brumm and colleagues dated theoldest layers of the popcorn deposits. In 2014, histeam dated popcorns on a hand stencil to at least40,000 years ago (3). The subsequent discovery of ahunting scene in another Indonesian cave in 2019pushed back the oldest figurative art to 43,900 yearsago (4). And then, in 2017, Brumm’s team found thepigs and dated them to 45,500 years ago by using acalcite deposit, making that work, published in 2021,so far, “the oldest representational painting in theworld,” Brumm says. The discoveries in Sulawesicould imply that representational art began in Asia,but more likely, Brumm says, it’s just part of a trail ofrepresentational art through human history. Heexpects the oldest rock art will eventually turn upfrom before Homo sapiens’ diaspora out of Africa.

Marks and MeaningOther interpretations for what constitutes “art” couldsuggest a different origin story—one that doesn’t nec-essarily begin with our species. Evidence of abstractimages dates as far back as 500,000 years ago, whenHomo erectus etched zig zag lines into a seashell inJava (5). And just this year, archaeologist Dirk Leder dis-covered 51,000-year-old abstract triple L-shaped pat-terns carved in deer bone, placed between a cave bearskull and two deer shoulder blades, in a Neanderthalcave dwelling in Germany (6). Microscopy and CT scansrevealed a three-dimensional picture of the bone inwhich the engravings are precisely spaced, with cuts atneat angles, suggesting they were made deliberatelyrather than as accidental hacking marks from a tool. Thecarving’s estimated age of 51,000 years is based onradiocarbon dating of collagen in the bone itself, which,combined with tools characteristic of Neanderthals atthe site, implies that it was made several thousand yearsbefore Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.

The takeaway is twofold, says Leder, who is at theLower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage inHanover, Germany. First, Neanderthals were capableof constructing deliberate symbolic expressions, anotion that has been debated in the past. And sec-ond, he says, art’s origins should be pushed back“not just to 45,000 years ago, but a much longertimeframe.” Leder expects that both Homo sapiens

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and Neanderthals were making expressive and com-municative carvings and drawings—even if not repre-sentational—off and on throughout their history, andthat although debate will likely continue, artisticexpressions made by Neanderthals, and possibly evenearlier hominins, will be recognized more and more.

If Leder’s and others’ definitions of art seem sub-jective, they are. But cognitive scientists are now try-ing to offer a more objective assessment bypinpointing the origins of symbolism—which sometreat as a synonym for the origins of art itself. Somearchaeologists argue that each scribble denotessome meaning. A circle for instance, might mean“horse,” although the shape looks nothing like theanimal. Others see the carvings as aesthetically inter-esting, but otherwise meaningless, decorations.

To help resolve the debate, cognitive scientistKristian Tyl�en, at Aarhus University in Denmark, col-laborated with archaeologists beginning in 2017,with a resulting study published in 2020, using up-to-100,000-year-old abstract carvings from South Afri-ca’s Blombos cave and other sites to probe thebeginnings of symbolic behavior (7). Tyl�en and col-laborators designed a series of cognitive experimentsfor modern-day human subjects, testing, for instance,how memorable and how discriminable each carvedpattern is. If there were some adaptive pressure tomake patterns mean specific things over time, forinstance evolving from simple grids into pictogramsor words, archaeologists would expect the patternsto become more memorable and easier to tell apartover thousands of years.

The researchers showed subjects the ancientengravings, for instance flashing the images on a mon-itor for a few seconds and then asking participants toredraw the pattern they’d just seen from memory.Consistent with the evolution of symbolism, younger

artifacts were easier to recall than older ones. How-ever, in another set of experiments in the same study,participants matched identical patterns as quickly aspossible. Here, the researchers did not find meaningfuldifferences in the discriminability of younger or olderpatterns. “We should think about these scribbles asproto-art,” Tyl�en says. “They were made to be prettyand stimulate the visual system, more than to be com-municative signs that denote a particular meaning.”Derek Hodgson, a neuro-archaeologist now semi-retired from the University of York in England, hadpublished a 2019 review proposing essentially thesame conclusion (8). He suspects that the first inten-tional markings, often parallel lines or crosses, resultedfrom a bias in the visual cortex, in which neurons areparticularly sensitive to horizontal and vertical lines. Ifthe marks had greater symbolic meaning, Hodgsonadds, he would expect to see more variation betweenthem from one culture to the next, just as languagesvary. But instead, the earliest grids, V-shapes, and linesturn up in a limited number of configurations aroundthe world, suggesting to Hodgson that they were visu-ally interesting but not explicitly meaningful.

Hodgson’s theory, however, was met with swift dis-agreement in a 2019 paper by archaeologist Francescod’Errico and collaborators (9). D’Errico pointed out thathe’d used functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) in a prior study to identify the brain areas stimu-lated by a variety of images, including 540,000- to30,000-year-old engravings, as well as landscapes,objects, words with no meaning in alphabetic writing,and fragments of Linear B ancient writing systems, aswell as the scrambled versions of all these stimuli (10).D’Errico and coauthors found that the scrambled ver-sions of all the stimuli were processed in participants’primary visual cortexes, indicating simple visual percep-tion without further processing by the brain. But theengravings activated brain regions in a similar patternto how objects are perceived, suggesting that they areprocessed as organized visual representations and mayhave been used to attach symbolic meaning.

One limitation of modern studies is that they usemodern human subjects. In d’Errico’s work, for exam-ple, modern brain activity in areas associated withcomplex forms is interpreted as evidence of symbolicmeaning thousands of years ago. “The problem is,modern humans have learned to read and write, so wehave highly symbolic ability attached to that area ofthe brain,” Hodgson says. Whether that brain areabehaved similarly before people had written languageis impossible to tell, he adds. D’Errico plans to addressthe limitation of working with modern humans in forth-coming unpublished work, by comparing patterns ofbrain activity in archaeologists to those of non-experts.Both the experts and non-experts will look at a collec-tion of real engravings and unintentional, natural mark-ings that look like engravings. The archaeologistsshould quickly spot the unintentional markings byusing a motor area of the brain that remembers thehand motions required to make a real carving. Com-paring the responses in the brains of modern expertswith those in the brains of modern non-experts is fairer,

In their 2020 study, Tyl�en and collaborators showed modern participants engrav-ing patterns, or “experimental stimuli,” distilled from the original outlines ofengravings on rock artifacts that were made over a period of 30,000 years.Younger artifacts had more attention-grabbing, intentional, and memorablepatterns than older ones, but they did not necessarily contain more distinguish-able patterns. Reprinted from ref. 7. Photographic materials adapted from refs.11 and 12, with permission from Elsevier. Original outlines reproduced from ref.13, with permission from Cambridge University Press.

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d’Errico says, than using the response of modern par-ticipants to infer symbolic meaning in the past.

On the phone from the University of Bordeaux inFrance, d’Errico is careful to note that “art is a veryambiguous notion.” He, Tyl�en, Hodgson, and theircollaborators are not explicitly debating the dawn ofart, per se. Rather, they’re arguing over the emer-gence and evolution of symbolic material culture.The San of the Kalahari use hatch marks to denote,as one example, ownerships of their arrows. Andalthough those markings have a symbolic role, theSan would consider them to be craftsmanship, notart. Still, when symbolism emerged is a relevantquestion to art’s beginnings, as some archaeologistsargue that images must be symbolic to be artistic.

D’Errico personally does not subscribe to thatview. Symbolism and art aren’t necessarily related,he says. Even if researchers arrive at some agreementon the definition of symbolism, they’d still be hardpressed to reach a consensus on the definition of artitself—and such a consensus could still deviate fromthe beliefs of the artists themselves. For his part,without proof that a given society had an indepen-dent role for the artist, d’Errico would be hesitant tosay that group made “art” per se. “I think art beginsin a society when someone gets a societal role as art-ist, independent of what they’re producing,” he says.“The society is recognizing someone has specialtraining and taste that others cannot do.”

So when was the earliest art? The answer dependson which definition of art an archaeologist adheres to

and which specific research questions they’re asking.The conceit that abstract art is primitive, and thenevolved into representational art, seems increasinglyflawed. Tyl�en, for his part, suspects that abstract art andfigurative work such as the Sulawesi pigs could haveindependent origins. In Europe, some Paleolithic animalfigurines, which appear after the dawn of representa-tional art, are decorated with abstract engravings similarto much older patterns. That suggests two simultaneousforms of expression: One that’s purely aesthetic andabstract, and one that’s symbolic, representational, andperhaps requires more complex cognition.

Looking ahead, the Sulawesi pigs may not be theoldest figurative art for long. Brumm is now applyingfor funding to explore the islands between Sulawesiand Papua Indonesia, following the path of those whofirst migrated down the Indonesian island chain andonto the northern tip of Australia some 65,000 yearsago. “We hope to find earlier rock art in these unex-plored islands east of Sulawesi,” Brumm says. If paint-ings there are indeed as old as the first inhabitants ofAustralia, it would suggest that wayfarers have carriedartistic expression for at least twice as long as some19th- and 20th-century archaeologists had thought.

It’s these big questions—and historical revi-sions—that are piquing the interest of archaeolo-gists and others. “It’s one of the biggest questionsin archaeology,” Brumm says. “When did ourancestors or close relatives start to produce mark-ings or forms on the continuum of art, and why didthey do it?”

1 A. Brumm et al., Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi. Sci. Adv. 7, eabd4648 (2021).2 P. M. Gray, “Cave art and the evolution of the human mind,” Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New

Zealand (2010).3 M. Aubert et al., Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia.Nature 514, 223–227 (2014).4 M. Aubert et al., Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art.Nature 576, 442–445 (2019).5 J. C. A. Joordens et al., Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving.Nature 518, 228–231 (2015).6 D. Leder et al., A 51,000-year-old engraved bone reveals Neanderthals’ capacity for symbolic behaviour. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 5,

1273–1282 (2021).7 K. Tyl�en et al., The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 4578–4584 (2020).8 D. Hodgson, The origin, significance, and development of the earliest geometric patterns in the archaeological record. J. Archaeol.

Sci. Rep. 24, 588–592 (2019).9 E. Mellet, I. Colag�e, A. Bender, C. S. Henshilwood, What processes sparked off symbolic representations? A reply to Hodgson and

an alternative perspective. J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 28, 102043 (2019).10 E. Mellet et al., Neuroimaging supports the representational nature of the earliest human engravings. R. Soc. Open Sci. 6, 190086

(2019).11 C. S. Henshilwood, F. d'Errico, I. Watts, Engraved ochres from the middle stone age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. J. Hum.

Evol. 57, 27–47 (2009).12 P.-J. Texier et al., The context, form and significance of the MSA engraved ostrich eggshell collection from Diepkloof Rock Shelter,

Western Cape, South Africa. J. Archaeol. Sci. 40, 3412–3431 (2013).13 D. Hodgson, Decoding the Blombos engravings, shell beads and Diepkloof ostrich eggshell patterns. Camb. Archaeol. J. 24,

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