Discovering the Oldest Figural Paintings on Earth

via The New Yorker, 13 November 2021: An interview with Indonesian archaeologist and grad student Basran Burhan, one of the team members who helped discover the 45,000-year-old painting of a warty pig in Sulawesi.

Basran Burhan was born in Indonesia, on the centrally located island of Sulawesi. He studied archeology at Hasanuddin University, at first, he told me, mostly because he liked how it involved “a lot of outdoor activities.” After graduating, in 2010, he worked for a few different Indonesian research and cultural heritage institutions. He also became an independent archeologist, helping organize excavations for a researcher named Adam Brumm at Griffith University, in Australia. Burhan’s field work struck Brumm as exceptional, and on the strength of it Brumm tried to get Burhan into a Ph.D. program. But Burhan’s imperfect English delayed this project for a number of years. Instead, he kept working for Brumm and his team.

In 2017, Burhan was helping Brumm and other researchers plan their next season of fieldwork: searching for evidence of Paleolithic humans in Sulawesi. Earlier that year, Brumm had briefly explored a new area on the island that seemed promising. Burhan and a team of six Indonesian archeologists were sent there on a field exploration.

Source: Discovering the Oldest Figural Paintings on Earth | The New Yorker