First Stories: The Ice Age Art of Sulawesi
May 31 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm America/Chicago
Location: The Field Museum
Chicago, IL
Tickets: Free | Registration required
Ice Age Art of Sulawesi
Hear about the discovery of the oldest cave art in the world!
In the 1950s, the discovery of prehistoric rock art was reported for the first time on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. These images were found in limestone caves in the karst hills of Maros-Pangkep. At the time, it was believed this art had been left by early Neolithic farmers, making them about 4,000 years old. However, in 2014, an Australian-Indonesian team dated the Maros-Pangkep art for the first time using a uranium-series analysis of natural mineral coatings that had formed on some of the images.
The earliest dated image yielded a minimum age of 40,000 years, making it compatible with cave art in Spain, the oldest known art in the world at the time. The Sulawesi art challenged the long-accepted story that the birthplace of human art and culture had been in Europe.
The earliest painting, with a minimum age of 51,200 years, is a scene portraying human-like figures interacting with a pig. It is the oldest cave art attributed to humans and the earliest known examples of visual storytelling in the world, providing crucial insights into the development of human cognition.
Register to attend in person or online
You can attend this free event at the Field Museum in Chicago or online. Registration is required. Click here to register for in-person or online attendance.
Parking may be impacted by a nearby event. We encourage taking a taxi or public transportation.
About the speaker
Adam Brumm is a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. His contributions to the field span 21 years of research in Indonesia, including extensive fieldwork on Flores and Sulawesi, two islands that loom large in our understanding of early humans. In Flores, his team unearthed fossils of archaic hominins that are the oldest found on the island and seem to represent a form ancestral to the celebrated ‘Hobbit’ (Homo floresiensis). In Sulawesi, his discoveries, with numerous colleagues, of a series of ‘ice age’ cave paintings were deemed to be among the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year on two occasions (2014 and 2019) by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Brumm completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 2007 and has since held several postdoctoral research fellowships, including at the University of Cambridge.
Resources to learn more
Quick picks:
Found in a cave in Indonesia, we can now show the world’s oldest figurative art is 51,200 years old
Google Arts and Culture virtual tour of the Indonesian cave art site
Dig deeper:
Origin Stories: The First Story
Sponsors
This lecture is in partnership with the Field Museum and Chicago Council on Science and Technology and is generously sponsored by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
