The First Story

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This is Origin Stories, the
Leaky Foundation podcast.

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I’m Meredith Johnson.
Before we get to the story,

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I want to thank all of you
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Thank you so much for helping us out,

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and thanks

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for listening to the show.
Now, here’s our story.

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One day more than 50,000
years ago on what’s now the

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Indonesian Island of Sui,

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someone climbed a towering rock formation
to paint a picture on the ceiling

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of a cave, almost 500 feet off the ground.

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A picture that tells a story
using a purplish red mineral

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pigment, they painted mysterious
human figures and a wild pig.

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

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ritual. The meaning is lost through time,

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but it’s clear that this picture
has meaning and action and a story.

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This painting is now the oldest known
example of visual storytelling in the

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world,

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and it’s older than the figurative
cave paintings of France and Spain.

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

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The discovery was just published
in the Journal Nature this July,

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and today on the show we’ll hear the
story of these mysterious images,

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where they were found, how scientists
did the tricky work of dating them,

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and what this art might tell
us about human evolution,

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human imagination and culture.

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There are lots of archeologists that feel
a real human connection when they hold

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a stone tool, for example, in their hand,

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that maybe it’s a sense of
connection to those early people,

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and it is obviously a
reflection into their minds.

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But art is in a different league.

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That’s Adam Brum. Adam is a
professor at Griffith University.

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In Brisbane, which is the
capital of Queensland,
Australia. I’m an archeologist.

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Most of my work is based in Indonesia,

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and I’m looking at the very earliest
human settlement of that region.

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Adam first went to Indonesia to try
to understand ancient hominins through

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finding and studying fossils
and artifacts like stone tools.

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He had no idea then, but the discoveries
he and his collaborators would make,

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there would be about something even
more uniquely human than tools.

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Some of the first hominin fossils found
anywhere in the world were found in

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Indonesia in 1891 on the island of Java.

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These were the remains of a
homoerectus nicknamed Java Man,

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and there’s evidence that Homo erectus
was there from at least 1.2 million years

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ago, maybe even as far
back as 1.5 million.

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And back then in the ice age
when sea levels were lower,

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Java wasn’t an island like it is now.

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It was part of an enormous
continental landmass called Sunda.

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So Java was essentially the
very southeastern tip of Asia,

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and the fact that Java
man was there so long ago,

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it makes sense his species could
have made that journey on foot.

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The real mystery is when they managed
to get across from this continental

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landmass onto these isolated islands
to the east in a region that we call

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Wallia,

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which is essentially a whole collection
of isolated oceanic islands that have

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never had a direct terrestrial land
connection to this ice age landmass.

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And then that’s when
things start to get very,

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very interesting because we’re talking
hominins crossing from a mainland across

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major sea gaps to reach
these isolated islands.

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The largest of these
isolated islands is Sulawesi,

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and much of Adam’s career
has been focused there.

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It’s the 11th largest island in the
world with many plants and animals that

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aren’t found anywhere else.

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Sulawesi is a fascinating island.
It’s a very vibrant place.

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It it’s quite a strangely shaped island.

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It essentially consists of
a central mountainous core
with a series of radiating

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arm like peninsulas coming out of it.

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Adam’s first research on Sulawesi was
in the southern part of the island in a

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region called Maros. It’s made up
of rural communities and villages,

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and its dotted with dramatic
towering rock formations that rose up

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from the bottom of the
sea millions of years ago.

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These towers are formed out of pure
limestone and from top to bottom,

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they’re just riddled with
caves and rock shelters,

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and then at the outside of them are all
clothed in dense tropical vegetation.

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They literally look like towers that
emerge almost like dragon’s teeth out of

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flat countryside. That’s all
under extensive rice cultivation.

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It’s some of the most stunning landscape
scenery, I believe you can see,

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and you just know there’s just a huge
amount of evidence for ancient human life.

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It’s quite exhilarating.

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With so many caves and rock shelters.

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This area of Sulawesi alone could occupy
archeologists and paleoanthropologists

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for several lifetimes.

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Adam and his collaborators
started work there in 2011,

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looking for fossils and stone tools
to help piece together the early human

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history of Sulawesi. This work
didn’t go as they’d hoped,

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but it set them on the path to making
some of the biggest and most surprising

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scientific discoveries of that
decade and possibly this one too.

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Initially,

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we started excavating a
rock shelter called Liang

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BorTong two, which means bird cave two.

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The site was first
excavated in the mid 1970s,

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and it was pretty much the only
known ice age site on the island.

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

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So the original excavator had reached
about three or four meters depth

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in his archeological trench and had
found evidence for humans at that

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point in time,

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stone tools dating to what he thought
was 30 to 40,000 years ago at that point.

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And so we resolved to go deeper to
see how far back in time the human

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occupation record might go there. And
this being originally Mike Morwood’s dig,

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he was hoping to find some
sort of Sulawesi Hobbits at
the bottom of the trench,

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but sadly, it was not to be.

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We did manage to get about two or three
meters deeper than the 1970s trench,

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but the technical problems with
that site are kind of legendary.

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So as to exactly what we have,

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what the stories are at that site
is a little bit still mysterious.

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The site they re excavated was right
near one of the first sites in Sulawesi,

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where in the 1950s a Dutch archeologist
noticed the presence of rock art.

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Simple painted images of
hands called hand stencils.

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Hand stencils are these images of
human hands created by the person would

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place the hand against,
say the wall of the cave,

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and then spray a mouthful
of paint around the hand.

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And when they remove the hand,

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there would be this negative
outline left of the hand.

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

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A few days after seeing the hand stencils,

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one of the Dutch archeologists team
members found a naturalistic painting of a

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pig.

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And then as they started to explore the
wider area, there are caves everywhere,

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they started to notice
more of this rock art.

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I’ve known about the rock art for a
long time when I first started to work

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Insisi in 2011,

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but it was not really very
well known outside Indonesia.

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It was assumed not to be particularly old.

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So Adam was interested in the rock art,

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and he was curious about
how old this art could be,

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but he didn’t think it was part of the
prehistoric puzzle he was working on.

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My primary aim was to
dig deeper at that site,

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but it was when we were taking days
off on Sundays from the dig and sort of

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wandering around exploring all this rock
art in these caves that I noticed that

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there could be a way to date
the art for the first time.

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And then this led us off into
this whole new trajectory,

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this whole new avenue of inquiry.

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What did you notice?

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Well, can I tell a story about, yeah,
please tell me what happened that day.

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It was in 2011,

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the first season of this Stig in
Liang Bong two, this cave site,

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and we’d dig for six days a week, and
on Sunday we would take a day off,

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and one of my Indonesian
colleagues, Budianto Budi Hakim,

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who’s a legendary archeologist of South
Sulawes from the local Bugis community,

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he knows all of the sites in that area,
all the archeology sites in Maros.

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And he told me about this
one site called Liang Jarre,

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which is known as the Cave of the
Fingers. Literally translated.

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This cave is known for its
hand stencil paintings,

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and some of them have these
curiously pointed fingers.

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So Mr. Budi invites him along to the
site and they go there with all their

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Indonesian students.

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

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There was this huge torrential downpour.

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We rushed into this local village where
the people there looked after us and

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took us into their house and fed
us corn jagom which is a very

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popular snack in South Sulawesi.

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

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

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And so the corn itself is
slightly significant here,

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so bear that in mind. Anyway, so
it stops raining after a while,

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and we go up into this cave site,

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and booty was trying to get me
interested in excavating the site itself.

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As I explained earlier, we’re having
some difficulties at the main dig site,

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but I looked at the site itself and I
thought, yeah, it’s interesting to dig,

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but we were too busy at the
other site. As it turns out,

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Budi excavated there later and
found a very important discovery,

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so I was wrong about that.
Anyway, but on this day,

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we’re looking at these hand stencils,
exploring the site and looking around.

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And then there was this one part of
the wall, this limestone cave wall,

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which had lots and lots of
these images of human hands.

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Scientists generally believe these
couldn’t have been more than a couple

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thousand years old. And he’s looking
at these paintings and again,

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wondering how old could they be?

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But then looking at one
series of hand stencils,

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I noticed these funny little
growths all over them.

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They kind of looked a little bit like
whiteish gray warts or little bits

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of cauliflower almost stuck to the top
of these hand stencils. And in fact,

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there were so many of them in some cases
that they almost completely obscured

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these hand stencils.

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The hand stencils themselves are made
out of this sort of reddish purplish

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paint,

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which usually stand out quite well
against the whiteish gray of the

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limestone walls. But in some cases,

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these little funny little growths were
almost completely blotting out these hand

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stencils. I was thinking,
what are these things?

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I thought maybe there was some sort
of microbial growths or something,

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but they seem very, very hard.
Okay, these little wartlike growths.

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And I thought at that
stage that well, rock art,

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it’s very difficult to date,

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but this could provide a means potentially
of dating the artworks themselves.

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Rock art paintings are typically
made with minerals like ochre,

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which is a natural earth pigment ochre
doesn’t have carbon scientists can use to

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figure out dates, but these warts
were on top of the paintings,

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so they had to have formed
after the paintings were made.

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And Adam wondered if the little warty
growths could be used as sort of a time

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marker, because if you
could date the growths,

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you would know that the art underneath
was at least as old as the growth that

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had formed on top of it.

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

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Australia.

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

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He’s a French Canadian, and
then he, funnily enough,

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was probably the world’s leading
expert in rock art dating,

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using a method at that time,
known as uranium series analysis.

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This is a method that measures the
radioactive decay of uranium within things

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like these growths on top
of the rock art paintings,

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and that decay can be
translated into time.

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And if you’re lucky enough to have
some of these little calcium carbonate

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growths forming over the top of the
rock art, then using this method,

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he was an expert in
uranium series analysis.

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You can infer an age for the artworks
themselves. So I was lucky enough,

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it’s just coincidence that he was in my
office and I showed him images of these

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little funny growths over the top of
these hand stencils in the cave of fingers

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in South Sil Oasis, and he was
very excited. As soon as he saw it,

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he tried to date enough rock art to
realize that this was a big opportunity.

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So he immediately said, yep,

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00:13:15,400 –> 00:13:18,850
I’m going to come over and take some
samples of those things first opportunity,

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00:13:18,850 –> 00:13:20,830
and we’re going to try to date
’em. And that’s where it led to.

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00:13:20,830 –> 00:13:24,850
But the reason I initially mentioned
corn was there is a connection.

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00:13:25,210 –> 00:13:29,740
Those little growths turned out to be
what Theologists referred to as oid spill

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00:13:30,490 –> 00:13:34,870
thas, or in the common term cave popcorn.

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00:13:36,700 –> 00:13:37,480
So yeah,

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00:13:37,480 –> 00:13:40,450
I’ve always thought there was a strange
connection between eating that corn

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00:13:40,480 –> 00:13:44,410
before I went into the cave and then
finding these cave popcorns all over this

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00:13:44,410 –> 00:13:48,130
art that eventually provided a
way for us to date it. So anyway,

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00:13:48,130 –> 00:13:51,010
it’s a meaningful story to me. Yeah.

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00:13:52,090 –> 00:13:55,690
The next year, Maxime Aubert,
the rock art dating expert,

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00:13:55,870 –> 00:13:59,740
came and took samples of cave
popcorn from several sites in Maros.

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00:14:00,520 –> 00:14:02,770
He took them back to
the lab and dated them.

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00:14:03,580 –> 00:14:07,360
They turned out to be
unexpectedly old, incredibly old.

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00:14:07,690 –> 00:14:10,810
I wasn’t really sure what
to expect. In hindsight,

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00:14:11,230 –> 00:14:15,850
we were digging a site that was 30 or
40,000 years old in the same area where we

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00:14:15,850 –> 00:14:16,750
have this rock art.

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00:14:17,170 –> 00:14:21,190
So we knew that there were humans
there at a very early point in time,

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00:14:21,670 –> 00:14:25,210
and we were finding ochre,
so mineral pigments,

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00:14:25,270 –> 00:14:28,930
the same pigments that were
probably used to produce this art.

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00:14:29,230 –> 00:14:33,040
We were finding these pigments in
the archeological layers at 30,

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00:14:33,040 –> 00:14:35,770
40,000 years ago. So in hindsight,

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00:14:35,770 –> 00:14:38,770
I should have expected that
that rock art would be very old,

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00:14:38,830 –> 00:14:41,080
but I didn’t really know
what to expect, to be honest.

241
00:14:41,080 –> 00:14:42,670
But it turned out to be incredibly old.

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00:14:42,670 –> 00:14:47,650
40,000 years old was
the date of 40,000 for

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00:14:47,650 –> 00:14:52,220
a hand. Stansil was what max produced
in those early days back 2012.

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00:14:52,730 –> 00:14:57,530
And that was incredibly exciting because
that was by far the earliest evidence

245
00:14:57,530 –> 00:15:01,700
we had anywhere outside
Europe really for rock art

246
00:15:01,940 –> 00:15:03,710
production. So that was, at that time,

247
00:15:03,710 –> 00:15:07,940
it was compatible in age with the earliest
rock art known from France and Spain,

248
00:15:08,000 –> 00:15:10,430
which was pretty unexpected and exciting.

249
00:15:11,030 –> 00:15:13,370
So they had this very surprising,

250
00:15:13,490 –> 00:15:16,970
very ancient rock art from the
humid tropical island of soi.

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00:15:17,870 –> 00:15:22,010
They had a very exciting date of 40,000
years for a hand stencil painting,

252
00:15:22,760 –> 00:15:27,140
but it was maybe a little too unexpected
for some of the scientific journals at

253
00:15:27,140 –> 00:15:27,973
the time.

254
00:15:28,280 –> 00:15:32,990
We actually had some difficulty convincing
at our esteemed colleagues through

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00:15:32,990 –> 00:15:36,620
the peer review process of the
significance of the finding.

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00:15:37,130 –> 00:15:40,490
Adam figured it had something to do with
the simplicity of the paintings they’d

257
00:15:40,490 –> 00:15:42,110
found, like sure,

258
00:15:42,140 –> 00:15:45,800
they were similar in age to the very
old paintings found in France and Spain,

259
00:15:46,340 –> 00:15:48,260
but they were just hand stencils,

260
00:15:48,950 –> 00:15:53,690
not the mind blowing masterpiece,
animal drawings of the European caves.

261
00:15:54,050 –> 00:15:55,790
We had to find animal art, okay.

262
00:15:55,790 –> 00:16:00,590
We had to find these early dates on
similarly spectacular images of the animal

263
00:16:00,590 –> 00:16:04,370
world, which the European,
European artists justly famous for.

264
00:16:04,820 –> 00:16:06,380
Ma did have animal art,

265
00:16:07,580 –> 00:16:10,340
large naturalistic paintings of wild pigs,

266
00:16:10,370 –> 00:16:14,540
and these small wild cattle called
Anoa. Those paintings were rare,

267
00:16:14,780 –> 00:16:17,600
and the ones they found so far
didn’t have the cave popcorn,

268
00:16:17,600 –> 00:16:18,950
so they couldn’t prove their age.

269
00:16:19,520 –> 00:16:22,100
So we spent a lot of time exploring,

270
00:16:22,130 –> 00:16:26,600
visiting every site that our Indonesian
archeologists colleagues knew about that

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00:16:26,600 –> 00:16:31,070
had animal art. And eventually
at a site called Liang sang,

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00:16:31,460 –> 00:16:34,220
which is actually quite close to
all the sites we’d been digging.

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00:16:34,610 –> 00:16:39,400
I went in there one day again with
Budianto Hakim with Budi, Mr. Budi,

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00:16:39,400 –> 00:16:43,850
that means as the standard way of
referring to people in Indonesia to blokes

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00:16:44,270 –> 00:16:48,530
to men. And I went into the
site with the famous Mr. Budi,

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00:16:48,890 –> 00:16:51,560
and there’s lots of hand
stencils everywhere, as always,

277
00:16:51,620 –> 00:16:53,030
lots of popcorn on the walls.

278
00:16:53,030 –> 00:16:57,320
And I was looking up at the
ceiling getting a little
bit dispirited because we’d

279
00:16:57,440 –> 00:17:00,320
looked for this animal laugh for so long.
And then I was looking at the ceiling,

280
00:17:00,320 –> 00:17:04,280
and then I went, wait on in
amongst all this cave popcorns,

281
00:17:04,280 –> 00:17:09,170
it’s called a dark smudge ceiling
of this cave. I noticed this sort of

282
00:17:09,170 –> 00:17:13,220
ghostly outline of what looked like a
pig. And I was like, what’s going on here,

283
00:17:13,220 –> 00:17:14,690
Budi? And he looked up and he thought, oh,

284
00:17:15,140 –> 00:17:18,440
it’s the first time I’ve seen that pig
painting. And I was like, oh, okay. Wow.

285
00:17:18,890 –> 00:17:23,000
And then it was so hard to see because
it was just covered with cave popcorn.

286
00:17:23,030 –> 00:17:24,620
It was this painting of a pig,

287
00:17:24,620 –> 00:17:27,440
maybe about a meter or a
meter and a half in length,

288
00:17:28,100 –> 00:17:29,900
and quite a simple portrayal.

289
00:17:29,900 –> 00:17:33,440
But clearly you could see the
anatomical fidelity in the outline,

290
00:17:33,440 –> 00:17:36,020
depiction of this pig
shown inside profile,

291
00:17:36,290 –> 00:17:40,160
and it was covered with cave popcorn.
And immediately I rang Max, my colleague,

292
00:17:40,160 –> 00:17:42,620
who was out exploring
other caves in that region.

293
00:17:43,850 –> 00:17:47,510
Maxime Aubert was able to confirm that
they now had animal paintings that were

294
00:17:47,510 –> 00:17:49,260
at least 40,000 years old.

295
00:17:49,890 –> 00:17:52,200
On the strength of that, we
convinced our colleagues,

296
00:17:52,200 –> 00:17:55,440
we convinced the editor of
Nature and it was published,

297
00:17:55,440 –> 00:18:00,240
and the American Association for
the Advancement of Science deemed

298
00:18:00,240 –> 00:18:05,160
that discovery to be one of the top 10
breakthroughs of the year in any field of

299
00:18:05,160 –> 00:18:08,580
scientific research that year.
When we published it in 2014,

300
00:18:09,000 –> 00:18:12,570
I think it was that animal art
that got us there. And so that’s,

301
00:18:12,900 –> 00:18:17,760
with that very long segue
takes me into the next phase of

302
00:18:17,760 –> 00:18:22,290
our research in Maros, which has
really been focused on this animal art.

303
00:18:23,100 –> 00:18:27,360
Adam’s archeology colleagues in Indonesia
expanded their search for animal art.

304
00:18:27,840 –> 00:18:30,060
They did years of intense surveying,

305
00:18:30,420 –> 00:18:35,160
and they found hundreds of new rock art
sites in a 450 kilometer square area.

306
00:18:36,600 –> 00:18:41,580
For people listening in the US that’s
300 square miles about the size of New

307
00:18:41,580 –> 00:18:43,440
York City. Through these searches,

308
00:18:43,650 –> 00:18:48,540
they went from around 90 known rock
art sites in the Morros area to over

309
00:18:48,540 –> 00:18:49,740
600.

310
00:18:50,520 –> 00:18:55,020
And there’s still more. They’re
finding scores of new sites every year.

311
00:18:55,260 –> 00:18:59,250
This is just in areas that are surrounded
by villages that people have lived in

312
00:18:59,250 –> 00:19:00,390
for generations.

313
00:19:00,420 –> 00:19:04,620
But you just keep finding more and more
sites because the entrances to these

314
00:19:04,620 –> 00:19:06,870
caves are almost impossible
to see from the ground.

315
00:19:06,870 –> 00:19:08,880
They’re clothed in dense vegetation.

316
00:19:09,150 –> 00:19:11,640
You have to do some serious
climbing and exploring.

317
00:19:11,640 –> 00:19:14,580
A lot of the cave art sites
are located in high levels,

318
00:19:14,610 –> 00:19:19,230
and you’ll find rock art caves at
least 150 meters above the current

319
00:19:19,530 –> 00:19:20,370
ground surface.

320
00:19:20,760 –> 00:19:23,490
These ancient people went to a lot of
effort to get up to the tops of these

321
00:19:23,490 –> 00:19:27,450
towers to make this art probably for
some sort of ritual or symbolic purposes.

322
00:19:28,200 –> 00:19:32,040
As the team continued to look, they
continued to find more and more paintings.

323
00:19:32,940 –> 00:19:37,350
When he wasn’t in Sulawesi Adam’s phone
was blowing up with updates from his

324
00:19:37,350 –> 00:19:38,640
colleagues in Indonesia.

325
00:19:39,060 –> 00:19:40,530
I’d be in my office in Brisbane,

326
00:19:40,530 –> 00:19:44,400
and then I would be getting all these
WhatsApp messages with all these new

327
00:19:44,610 –> 00:19:48,390
images, dozens of new
sites with animal art

328
00:19:49,830 –> 00:19:52,530
paintings of these wild pigs,

329
00:19:53,130 –> 00:19:56,970
paintings of these wild
dwarf buffalo, the owas,

330
00:19:57,090 –> 00:20:01,650
and they just would blow me away. And
then one day I received this one message,

331
00:20:01,650 –> 00:20:05,910
I think it was just before
Christmas in 2017, and my colleague,

332
00:20:05,940 –> 00:20:08,670
who was an Indonesian rock art specialist,

333
00:20:11,010 –> 00:20:14,130
Adhi Agus or as his nickname is,

334
00:20:14,250 –> 00:20:18,870
and he was actually also a PhD student
of ours at Griffith at that time,

335
00:20:18,930 –> 00:20:23,880
and he sent me this incredible WhatsApp
image of this new site that had just

336
00:20:23,880 –> 00:20:28,350
been found in Maro in the very
northern park called Leang Burang

337
00:20:28,500 –> 00:20:29,333
four.

338
00:20:30,330 –> 00:20:34,410
And I was just blown away. I mean,

339
00:20:34,410 –> 00:20:36,420
they were quite fuzzy pixelated images,

340
00:20:36,420 –> 00:20:41,160
but I could see that this was a
very rare depiction of a dwarf

341
00:20:41,160 –> 00:20:44,520
buffalo. And there was some
sort of something else,

342
00:20:44,550 –> 00:20:46,290
something more.

343
00:20:48,460 –> 00:20:53,170
You can see what looked like these
little lines emerging from the chest

344
00:20:53,170 –> 00:20:55,990
area of this painting,
of this dwarf buffalo,

345
00:20:55,990 –> 00:20:58,900
which to me looked like they could be
spears or something like that. All of.

346
00:20:59,770 –> 00:21:03,790
The animal paintings they’d found
before had been just that animals,

347
00:21:04,510 –> 00:21:08,500
but here was a representation
of human presence.

348
00:21:08,980 –> 00:21:12,400
The only entrance to the site where
this image was painted is a tiny,

349
00:21:12,400 –> 00:21:16,450
narrow opening in the ceiling of
another rock art site inside one of the

350
00:21:16,450 –> 00:21:17,530
limestone towers.

351
00:21:18,700 –> 00:21:22,930
It was discovered by one of our
Indonesian archeologists, Mr. Hamrrula,

352
00:21:23,230 –> 00:21:28,150
or Ambu as his nickname is. And he’s
a very experienced caver and climber,

353
00:21:28,660 –> 00:21:32,620
and he was exploring this cave art site
that had already already been known

354
00:21:32,620 –> 00:21:33,453
before.

355
00:21:33,490 –> 00:21:36,070
Mr. Hamrrula was monitoring
the condition of the art.

356
00:21:36,460 –> 00:21:40,570
It was something he did regularly because
the art is located quite close to a

357
00:21:40,570 –> 00:21:42,010
cement production facility,

358
00:21:42,280 –> 00:21:45,010
and there can be a lot of dust and
debris that might impact the art.

359
00:21:45,670 –> 00:21:49,450
While he was doing that, he noticed
the tiny little opening in the ceiling.

360
00:21:50,170 –> 00:21:52,420
And he thought, Ambu being
the sort of guy he is,

361
00:21:52,420 –> 00:21:56,050
I’m going to climb up there and see if
I can go in and see where it might lead

362
00:21:56,050 –> 00:21:58,630
to. And he didn’t have any
climbing equipment on him.

363
00:21:58,630 –> 00:22:01,930
So he literally climbed
up a fig tree vine,

364
00:22:01,930 –> 00:22:05,260
which was growing through all the holes
in the rock high up the cliff face,

365
00:22:05,260 –> 00:22:08,800
and it shoots down these sort of
runner vines, like Tarzan style.

366
00:22:08,800 –> 00:22:12,760
And he climbed up one of those and
then somehow managed to crawl across a

367
00:22:12,760 –> 00:22:17,350
vertical rock face his very good climber
and shimmed his way into this tiny

368
00:22:17,350 –> 00:22:17,920
little hole.

369
00:22:17,920 –> 00:22:21,910
And it was the opening to this larger
cave system located higher up in the cliff

370
00:22:21,910 –> 00:22:25,090
face. Nowadays, there’s
a very rickety ladder,

371
00:22:25,150 –> 00:22:28,540
vertical ladder going up five or six
meters that you have to climb up.

372
00:22:28,540 –> 00:22:32,230
And even that makes me a little bit
nervous. So once you get through this tiny

373
00:22:32,230 –> 00:22:36,370
little opening and into this
cave art site, your heart racing,

374
00:22:36,460 –> 00:22:38,380
you get up to the back of the cave,

375
00:22:38,380 –> 00:22:41,170
and at the back of that cave
is this incredible artwork,

376
00:22:41,200 –> 00:22:42,850
which is about four or five meters wide.

377
00:22:42,910 –> 00:22:47,710
And you look at what can only be
described as this very ancient story

378
00:22:47,740 –> 00:22:52,060
being played out on this
wall depicting animals, pigs,

379
00:22:52,060 –> 00:22:56,560
and dwarf bos being confronted
or hunted by these strange

380
00:22:56,560 –> 00:23:01,480
little characters, these little
figures that have human-like bodies,

381
00:23:01,480 –> 00:23:03,280
but some body parts of animals. Okay,

382
00:23:03,280 –> 00:23:06,850
so this is a very interesting part
of this site, is that the people,

383
00:23:06,850 –> 00:23:10,720
if you like doing the hunting
of these animals, are human,

384
00:23:10,720 –> 00:23:15,490
but also have qualities,
visible body parts of animals.

385
00:23:15,490 –> 00:23:15,910
For example,

386
00:23:15,910 –> 00:23:20,050
one little figure has what seems to
be the head of a bird with this long

387
00:23:20,050 –> 00:23:22,900
projecting beak. Another one of
these little figures has a tail,

388
00:23:23,200 –> 00:23:27,010
yet they’re holding spears or ropes or
some sort of material culture objects

389
00:23:27,010 –> 00:23:28,960
that they’re using to hunt these animals.

390
00:23:29,380 –> 00:23:33,760
So to look at that image
and then to try to work out

391
00:23:33,790 –> 00:23:36,430
what it could have meant
to these early people.

392
00:23:36,820 –> 00:23:40,360
What was clear was that
this painting told a story.

393
00:23:40,960 –> 00:23:45,800
So this was essentially the
first narrative pictorial
record of a narrative that

394
00:23:45,800 –> 00:23:49,820
we’d ever seen in the rock art
in Maro. And it was stunning.

395
00:23:49,850 –> 00:23:53,810
It just blew us away because
narrative composition scenes,

396
00:23:53,840 –> 00:23:55,670
if you like stories,

397
00:23:55,670 –> 00:23:59,180
these are real stories
being told through pictures.

398
00:23:59,630 –> 00:24:03,830
They were extremely rare in the Ice
age heart in Europe, very, very rare,

399
00:24:03,860 –> 00:24:07,130
extremely uncommon. So to find
something like that in Southeast Asia,

400
00:24:07,370 –> 00:24:08,540
it was very exciting.

401
00:24:09,410 –> 00:24:13,490
And the scene was covered in the cave
popcorn, which gave them a way to date it.

402
00:24:14,000 –> 00:24:17,210
And it was even earlier than any
of the other art they’d found.

403
00:24:20,810 –> 00:24:25,700
44,000 Years ago that
art was there on that

404
00:24:25,700 –> 00:24:29,510
wall when these little calcite popcorn
growth started to form on top of it.

405
00:24:29,780 –> 00:24:34,760
And that’s 44,000 years ago for a
narrative scene at that time was

406
00:24:34,760 –> 00:24:39,050
the earliest direct or indirect
evidence for human storytelling that was

407
00:24:39,050 –> 00:24:42,470
amazing. That was published
in 2019 in Nature and again,

408
00:24:42,470 –> 00:24:47,270
made the American Association for
the Advancement of Science’s top 10

409
00:24:47,270 –> 00:24:51,590
list, top 10 breakthroughs of the
Year, which was really, really cool.

410
00:24:52,310 –> 00:24:54,380
So in 2019 with this hunting scene,

411
00:24:54,680 –> 00:24:59,480
they had found the oldest surviving
imaginative creative story

412
00:24:59,990 –> 00:25:03,410
frozen in time to be
found 44,000 years later.

413
00:25:03,830 –> 00:25:06,350
And then they found more another scene,

414
00:25:06,410 –> 00:25:10,490
another story this time with three
pigs that were dated to at least

415
00:25:10,490 –> 00:25:13,250
45,500 years old.

416
00:25:14,150 –> 00:25:16,880
And this one particular
image was just stunning,

417
00:25:16,880 –> 00:25:19,610
just the most complete animal
painting I’d ever seen.

418
00:25:19,910 –> 00:25:22,850
It’s just this beautiful
big depiction of a pig.

419
00:25:23,120 –> 00:25:25,730
And there was three individual pigs,

420
00:25:25,730 –> 00:25:27,620
and they’re interacting
with each other in some way.

421
00:25:27,620 –> 00:25:29,810
One seems to be almost
leaping over the other,

422
00:25:29,870 –> 00:25:34,370
like maybe they were fighting or some
sort of ritual interaction between these

423
00:25:34,370 –> 00:25:37,550
animals possibly being captured
by these ancient human artists.

424
00:25:38,030 –> 00:25:42,710
We collected a tiny popcorn sample from
over the rear foot of that complete pig.

425
00:25:42,950 –> 00:25:46,880
And that brings us through to the current
time when Adam’s team made an even

426
00:25:46,880 –> 00:25:50,780
more ancient discovery, yet
another painting from Maros,

427
00:25:51,470 –> 00:25:53,570
the one we described at
the beginning of the story,

428
00:25:54,740 –> 00:25:58,460
they dated it to at
least 51,200 years ago.

429
00:25:59,060 –> 00:25:59,720
In this case,

430
00:25:59,720 –> 00:26:04,430
we have a beautiful painting of a warty
pig interacting with what seemed to be

431
00:26:04,430 –> 00:26:09,020
three human-like figures. It’s
very cryptic and enigmatic artwork,

432
00:26:09,020 –> 00:26:12,380
which we don’t quite know what these
ancient people were trying to convey

433
00:26:13,070 –> 00:26:14,300
through these motifs,

434
00:26:14,300 –> 00:26:18,410
but it seems to be some sort of human
animal interaction being depicted in the

435
00:26:18,410 –> 00:26:22,220
form of this story. And we just
keep finding more our colleagues,

436
00:26:22,220 –> 00:26:23,990
Indonesian colleagues.
This is another site,

437
00:26:24,710 –> 00:26:27,890
this new one that was also
WhatsApp to me. So yeah,

438
00:26:27,890 –> 00:26:32,810
I check my iPhone frequently for
messages from silhouettes whenever I’m

439
00:26:32,810 –> 00:26:36,170
back in Australia because it, there’s
just so much more there to be found.

440
00:26:42,320 –> 00:26:45,480
We’re an incredible species,
an extraordinary species,

441
00:26:45,480 –> 00:26:50,430
and to try to understand the story
of how we got to be this way, to me,

442
00:26:50,430 –> 00:26:52,470
it’s something profound,

443
00:26:52,470 –> 00:26:55,950
something that I take and my Indonesian
colleagues take very seriously.

444
00:26:55,950 –> 00:27:00,870
Just this basic need to go
out and explore the world

445
00:27:00,870 –> 00:27:04,800
around us for traces of the
human past and to try to

446
00:27:05,190 –> 00:27:10,140
reconstruct or unravel this incredible
story of who we are and how we got

447
00:27:10,140 –> 00:27:14,370
here as humans. It’s hard to describe.

448
00:27:14,820 –> 00:27:19,200
You try to be a scientist and you try
to be detached and scholarly about it,

449
00:27:19,200 –> 00:27:23,490
but you can’t help but be drawn into
the minds of these early artists

450
00:27:23,490 –> 00:27:26,910
and try to look at the world through
their eyes, the world that they lived in.

451
00:27:27,450 –> 00:27:31,740
So to get that sort of insight into
the way that their mind worked and

452
00:27:32,010 –> 00:27:36,060
their stories, their beliefs, their myths,

453
00:27:36,060 –> 00:27:39,570
potentially it gives us a sense
of who they are or who they were.

454
00:27:39,960 –> 00:27:44,340
There’s no one from that time to
tell us what these images meant,

455
00:27:44,850 –> 00:27:48,060
but I dunno, it’s the
stories in my opinion.

456
00:27:48,060 –> 00:27:51,030
That’s how you understand a
people is by their stories.

457
00:27:51,390 –> 00:27:52,560
Thank you so much.

458
00:27:52,710 –> 00:27:53,580
No worries. That was great. Yeah.

459
00:28:02,400 –> 00:28:04,680
Thank you to Adam Brom
for sharing his work.

460
00:28:04,950 –> 00:28:07,170
You can find more about this discovery,

461
00:28:07,170 –> 00:28:10,680
including pictures on our
website@leakyfoundation.org.

462
00:28:11,100 –> 00:28:13,680
You can also follow the
links in your show notes.

463
00:28:14,160 –> 00:28:16,860
Origin Stories is a project
of the Leaky Foundation,

464
00:28:17,160 –> 00:28:21,720
a nonprofit dedicated to funding human
origins research and sharing discoveries.

465
00:28:22,170 –> 00:28:23,700
Like I said, at the top of the show,

466
00:28:23,880 –> 00:28:27,600
we are nearing the end of our
quadruple Match challenge,

467
00:28:27,960 –> 00:28:30,960
so please go to leakey
foundation.org/origin stories,

468
00:28:31,170 –> 00:28:34,290
and your donation will be
quadruple matched. We really,

469
00:28:34,290 –> 00:28:35,520
really appreciate your help.

470
00:28:35,940 –> 00:28:40,440
This interview was recorded at Women’s
Audio Mission in San Francisco.

471
00:28:40,620 –> 00:28:42,360
Thank you to the wonderful people there.

472
00:28:42,900 –> 00:28:47,580
This episode was produced by me and
Ray Pang Sound Design by Ray Pang.

473
00:28:48,180 –> 00:28:52,200
Our editor is Audrey Quinn, and
our theme music is by Henry Nagel.

474
00:28:53,040 –> 00:28:55,470
Origin Stories is sponsored
by Jeannie Newman,

475
00:28:55,680 –> 00:28:57,390
the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation,

476
00:28:57,750 –> 00:29:00,060
and the Joan and Arnold
Travis Education Fund.

477
00:29:02,550 –> 00:29:06,450
We’ll be back next month with another
new story. Thanks for listening.