The Leang Tedongnge pig
A life-size warty pig painted in red ochre on a Sulawesi cave wall.
- When
- Known to
- ± 2 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
The painting at Leang Tedongnge shows a Sulawesi warty pig in profile, over a metre across, with facial warts and bristles rendered accurately, dated by uranium-series on overlying mineral deposits to at least 45,500 years ago. Two hand stencils sit above it. It is among the oldest known depictions of a real animal, and it demonstrates that figurative art was established in island Southeast Asia at least as early as in Europe — the European primacy in art history was an artefact of where people had looked.