Old Master? Cave paintings from 40,000 years ago are world's earliest figurative art

A painting of an animal in an Indonesian cave dates from at least 40,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest piece of figurative art, new research has shown. The painting in Borneo, possibly depicting a native type of wild cattle, is among thousands of artworks discovered decades ago in the remote region. But it was only using technology called uranium series analysis that researchers have finally been able to work out just when they were painted. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that cave painting did not emerge only in Europe, as was once thought. “We can see that figurative art developed and evolved more or less at the same time in Asia and in Europe,” researcher Maxime Aubert told AFP. In 2014, researchers dated figurative art on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to 35,000 years ago, but some of the paintings examined