The oldest illustrated story in the world
Rock paintings in Indonesia may provide the earliest evidence of narrative art to date. The images, which are around 44,000 years old, are said to depict hybrid creatures on the hunt.
Woolly rhinos, mammoths, bison - mankind's earliest works of art show what Homo sapiens saw 30,000 or 40,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. However, none of these images tell a concrete story or report on a specific event as we know it from later epochs - for example when the Egyptian king Narmer conquers cities and defeats the enemies on the 5000-year-old slate palette of the same name, or when on Greek vases of the early 1.millennium BC BC is told of shipwreck and funeral processions. Telling stories with visual means - this creative ability is a unique selling point of our species. Only Homo sapiens has mastered the task of devising fictional stories and formulating them visually. Where does this human behavior come from? For a long time, all evidence of the earliest figurative art came exclusively from Europe - none of it older than 40,000 years. Europe was considered the cradle of Ice Age art for good reason. But a few years ago, researchers at the other end of the world, in Southeast Asia, also found cave paintings made by Ice Age hunter-gatherers. And one of these paintings is not only older than its counterparts in Europe, but also probably tells a story…
