An ancient art gallery
In the remote Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, in the dense jungles of East Kalimantan, a reddish-orange painting covers a limestone wall. It depicts a large, wild bovine, likely a Bornean banteng (Bos javanicus), measuring about 1.5 meters in length. This rock art; it is the oldest known figurative painting in the world. A team of researchers led by Maxime Aubert and Pindi Setiawan used uranium-series analysis to date the calcite deposits that have formed over the artwork. The results provided a minimum age of 40,000 years, changing our understanding of where and when humans first began to create representative art.
The Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat peninsula is a karst formation, a geological formation of soluble limestone that has been shaped by water over millions of years. The result is a dramatic terrain of towering cliffs, sinkholes, and thousands of caves spread across 1.8 million hectares. The art within these caves reveals at least three distinct phases of human creativity. The oldest phase, from about 52,000 to 40,000 years ago, includes the banteng and numerous red-orange hand stencils. A later phase, beginning around 20,000 years ago, introduced mulberry-colored pigments and shows human-like figures, sometimes wearing headdresses, hunting or dancing. This artistic evolution suggests a long and continuous history of human occupation and cultural change in the region.