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Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories1. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling2-5, in the form of narrative compositions or 'scenes'2,5 that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures5. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes2,5, and of therianthropes6,7-abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on). In this record of creative expression (spanning from about 40 thousand years ago (ka) until the beginning of the Holocene epoch at around 10 ka), scenes in cave art are generally rare and chronologically late (dating to about 21-14 ka)7, and clear representations of therianthropes are uncommon6-the oldest such image is a carved figurine from Germany of a human with a feline head (dated to about 40-39 ka)8. Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is-to our knowledge-currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.
Previous uranium-series (U-series) dating has suggested that the oldest known figurative cave art is found in Indonesia9-11. Up until now, the earliest minimum U-series ages for representative artworks reflect dates of 40 ka for a naturalistic painting of a wild bovid in Kalimantan10 and, from south Sulawesi, 35.4 ka for a painting of a pig-possibly a female babirusa9 or young Sulawesi warty pig (Suscelebensis)12. Nonfigurative rock art dated to 65 ka in Spain13 has been attributed to Neanderthals, but this claim has been questioned on various grounds14-16. With a minimum age of 40.8 ka, the earliest dated art that is generally attributed to modern humans in Europe is an abstract 'disc' sign from the rock art site of El Castillo...