We describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 44 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

2021-11-13: The New Yorker has a nice background article, and it turns out newer research pushed the age 1 ka back:

The painting of the warty pig was at least 45 ka old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world. The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at 35 ka BP; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by 10 ka. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred 30-60 ka BP. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range. The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it”. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.”

2023-01-06: Insights into the why of cave paintings

the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons. Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar

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