The respected journal "Nature" has just just (Nov 6 2018) published a paper titled "
Palaeolithic cave art in Borneo" which reports "
a large reddish-orange figurative painting of an animal at Lubang Jeriji Saléh—a limestone cave in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo—yielded a minimum date of 40 ka, which to our knowledge is currently the oldest date for figurative artwork from anywhere in the world."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0679-9Assuming that the "science" is correct (and "Nature" is a prestigious journal with strict peer reviews) then this is comfortably "older" than e.g Chauvet!!
This is currently being "onward reported" by numerous daily newspapers etc around the World.
WHS travellers might be interested to note that the site of the Lubang Jeriji Saleh in East Kalimantan is in the area of Indonesia's T List site of "
Sangkulirang – Mangkalihat Karts: Prehistoric rock art area" (sic - It should of course be "Karst"!! See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat_Karst ) -
http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6009 The UNESCO entry contains a rather nice run down of the relative ages of a wide range of cave art sites from around the World - many of which are already inscribed! It was added in 2015 and the UNESCO description does not, of course, include this latest discovery - indeed the Cave remains are only a part of the wider claimed OUV.
I note also that the "second oldest" figurative art in the world (37900 YBP) is from Sulawesi and that this area too is on Indonesia's T List - "
Prehistoric Cave Sites in Maros-Pangkep" -
http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5467That dating only seems to have been made quite recently - c 2014 - and at that time made the claim to be the world's oldest!!
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/indonesian-cave-art-may-be-worlds-oldestWhether Indonesia will attempt to gain inscription for either of these T List sites is another matter!! They aren't exactly going to generate a lot of revenue!! Unless of course France would like to give them a very large amount of money to build a replica or 2 which could be sited in Jakarta I guess! But 3 of the 6 sites added to Indonesia's T List in 2015
are being progressed for nomination in 2019/20 and 21 according to our "information" - so, it is possible that Sangkulirang – Mangkalihat could "fit in" behind them. But the "Cave Art" domain has been getting a lot of attention recently with Chauvet (2014) and the German Ice Age Caves (2018) and can we really have a "race" by which any cave claiming greater age for its art work gets nominated?? It seems to be generally accepted now that "human art" goes back a lot further than was previously thought and also that it either occurred independently across human populations outside the most famous known sites in Europe or was taken to all these places by predecessors - so, with the latest techniques for dating art based on establishing the age of deposits under and over the art (thus permitting art based on ochre and scratching etc to be dated rather than only that which was charcoal based), we can expect more, and probably even earlier, examples to be discovered.