The world’s oldest picture gallery

THIS 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.