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Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the world's oldest known animal painting in the Leang Tedongnge cave in Indonesia.

The picture - which shows a Sulawesi warty pig with two hand prints above it - is believed to have been drawn 45,500 years ago.

It was painted using dark red ochre, a natural earth pigment containing different minerals and is thought to be part of a scene telling a story.

The image provides the earliest evidence of human settlement in the region.

"The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked," said Maxime Aubert, who is the co-author of the report published in Science Advances journal.

Mr Aubert's team removed a layer of calcite (a rock mineral) on top of the painting and used a process called Uranium-series isotope dating to work out its age - and therefore the approximate age of the artwork.

"It [the painting] could be much older because the dating that we're using only dates the calcite on top of it," Maxime Aubert added.

The report says the painting, which measures 136cm by 54cm, shows a pig which also appears to be facing two other pigs that were only partially preserved.

"The pig appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs," said co-author Adam Brumm.

The researchers believe the artists who created the image would have placed their hands on the cave's surface before spitting pigment over it to create the hand prints. They're hoping to extract DNA samples from any remaining saliva.

Ancient art

The painting could be the world's oldest animal art, but it isn't actually the oldest man-made cave art.

A drawing found in South Africa back in 2018 is about 73,000 years ago and it's thought to be the oldest known drawing.