An Indonesian cave painting that shows wild animals encountering otherworldly hunters may be the oldest known example of art depicting lifelike figures and the oldest example of visual storytelling. Discovered in 2017 on the island of Sulawesi, this roughly 4.5-meter-wide hunting scene was painted at least 43,900 years ago, says a team led by archaeologists Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, both of Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia. Part-human, part-animal hunters depicted in the mural indicate that people at the time believed in supernatural beings, the scientists report in the Dec. 19 Nature.
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