Ancient Indonesian Cave Paintings
What might be the oldest surviving work of art in the world—a painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi—features a babirusa, a peculiar species of wild pig that have fierce-looking tusks.
Archaeologists estimate this work is at least 35,400 years old, shattering the notion that humans began making art in Europe.
“It provides a new view about modern human origins, about when we became cognitively modern,” Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, has previously said. “It changes the when and the where of our species becoming self-aware and starting to think abstractly, to paint and to carve figurines.”