Many thousands of years ago, one or more stone-age humans used a red-hued ochre pigment to depict what looks like a pig hunt on the wall of a cave on what is now the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

Scientists have just dated the image to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the oldest example of visual storytelling on Earth by at least several thousand years.

“In contrast to single-figure depictions, the agency of the juxtaposed figures constituting a narrative scene allows a story to be told through images in a manner that does not require the producer of the art to be present to convey the narrative to an audience,” the researchers note in their paper, published this week in the journal Nature.