Same, this is 11,000 years before when we are now. We live in the year 2022, for context going the other direction this would be like the year 13,022. 😳😳 It’s the only way I can wrap my brain around this, utterly incredible to know humanity has been around that long in some way/shape/form!!

The 9th millennium BCE is not really all that early; humans had been making art for millennia by that point.

Some have argued, for example, that far earlier cave paintings contain narrative scenes.

>Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling, in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’ that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes and of therianthropes—abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on)...

>Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

“Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art” by Maxime Aubert, Rustan Lebe, et al. in Nature 576, 442–445 (2019)

That’s the part I love the most. New evidence to shake up old, dusty ideas of history.

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