World's Oldest Figurative Painting Discovered in Borneo Cave

A patchy, weathered painting of a beast daubed on the wall of a limestone cave in Borneo may be the oldest known example of figurative rock art, say researchers who dated the work.

Faded and fractured, the reddish-orange image depicts a plump but slender-legged animal, probably a species of wild cattle that still lives on the island, or simply dinner in the eyes of the artist, if one streak of ochre that resembles a spear protruding from its flank is any guide.

The animal is one of a trio of large creatures that adorn a wall in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave in the East Kalimantan province of Indonesian Borneo. The region’s rock art, which amounts to thousands of paintings in limestone caves, has been studied since 1994 when the images were first spotted by the French explorer Luc-Henri Fage.

“It is the oldest figurative cave painting in the world,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. “It’s amazing to see that. It’s an intimate window into the past.”

Aubert’s team found calcite crusts near the rear of the painted animal and used a technique called uranium series analysis to date them to at least 40,000 years old. If the measurement is accurate the Borneo paintings may be 4,500 years older than depictions of animals that adorn cave walls on the neighbouring island of Sulawesi.