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Over 50,000 years ago on what is now the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, someone climbed a towering rock formation and painted a mysterious image on a cave ceiling. The painting shows three half-human, half-animal figures and a large wild pig. The image, dated to 51,200 years old, is now the oldest known visual story in the world. In this episode, archaeologist Adam Brumm shares the story of this incredible discovery.

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Episode produced by Meredith Johnson and Ray Pang Sound design by Ray Pang Edited by Audrey Quinn

Theme music by Henry Nagle. Ending credit music by Lee Roservere. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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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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Your gift will be quadruple-matched.
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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00:12:29,890 –> 00:12:33,910
using a method at that time,
known as uranium series analysis.

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00:12:34,180 –> 00:12:38,350
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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00:12:47,230 –> 00:12:50,410
growths forming over the top of the
rock art, then using this method,

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00:12:50,410 –> 00:12:52,750
he was an expert in
uranium series analysis.

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00:12:52,960 –> 00:12:57,520
You can infer an age for the artworks
themselves. So I was lucky enough,

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00:12:57,520 –> 00:13:01,870
it’s just coincidence that he was in my
office and I showed him images of these

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00:13:01,870 –> 00:13:05,440
little funny growths over the top of
these hand stencils in the cave of fingers

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00:13:05,440 –> 00:13:09,820
in South Sil Oasis, and he was
very excited. As soon as he saw it,

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00:13:09,850 –> 00:13:13,690
he tried to date enough rock art to
realize that this was a big opportunity.

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00:13:13,690 –> 00:13:15,400
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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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

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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.

I [name], of [city, state ZIP], bequeath the sum of $[ ] or [ ] percent of my estate to L.S.B. Leakey Foundation for Research Related to Man’s Origins, Behavior & Survival, (dba The Leakey Foundation), a nonprofit organization with a business address of 1003B O’Reilly Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94129 and a tax identification number 95-2536475 for its unrestricted use and purpose.

If you have questions, please contact Sharal Camisa Smith sharal at leakeyfoundation.org. 

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