The world’s oldest picture gallery
Dec 12th 2019THIS PHOTOGRAPH shows the world’s oldest known art gallery. It is in a cave in Sulawesi, an island in Indonesia. It was discovered by a team led by Adam Brumm of Griffith University, in Australia, and is reported in this week’s Nature. The most ancient pictures in it date from 43,900 years ago—27,000 years before the well-known cave paintings at Lascaux, in France. Among the exhibits are two pigs and four dwarf buffalo. There are also eight figures that appear, on first glance, to be human, but which closer examination suggests also have animal features. One seems to have a tail, another a beak. Others have muzzles or snouts. Such constructs are known as therianthropes, and are found in many cultures (the centaurs of ancient Greece, for example, or the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis). The oldest known European therianthrope is a statue of a lion-headed man which dates from about 40,000 years ago. That ancient Sulawesians had similar ideas suggests therianthropy has deep roots in human culture.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address