The world’s oldest known example of cave art, dating back at least 67,800 years, has been discovered by researchers studying handprints in Indonesia.
The find, along with others recently made in the Southeast Asian country, helps scientists trying to determine when and where early humans first learned to make art and at what point their art became more complex.
The reddish hand stencils, though faded and barely visible, were found in the Liang Metanduno limestone cave on Muna, an island off the larger eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi. One of them was found to be at least 67,800 years old.
Indonesian and Australian researchers said the stencils were made by blowing pigment onto a hand pressed against the rock surface, leaving an outline. Fingertips reshaped to appear more pointed suggest that the hands were those of humans, possibly connected to the ancestors of the first Australians.
The paintings were dated by analyzing mineral crusts that had gradually formed on top of them.
The finding “is pretty extraordinary, because usually rock art is very difficult to date and it doesn’t date back to anywhere near that old,” said Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and a co-author of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The hand stencil is more than 15,000 years older than a painting in another cave on Sulawesi that the same team dated in 2024. That painting, which depicted three humanlike figures interacting with a pig, is thought to be about 51,200 years old.
“I thought we were doing pretty well then, but this one image just completely blew that other one away,” Brumm said.
“It really just shows how long people have been making rock art in that part of the world,” he said. “It’s a very long time.”
Researchers hope to find even older art, including storytelling art, in and around Indonesia, much of which remains archaeologically unexplored, he added.
Liang Metanduno is a well-known site for cave art that is open to tourists. But most of the art found so far is paintings depicting chickens and other domesticated animals that are thought to be much more recent, about 4,000 years old.
In 2015, Indonesian rock art specialist Adhi Oktaviana, the paper’s lead author, noticed faint images behind more recent ones that he thought could be hand stencils.
“No one had ever observed them before. No one even knew that they were there,” Brumm said. “But Adhi spotted them.”
For generations, researchers studying Ice Age cave paintings in places like France and Spain, which are about 30,000 to 40,000 years old, “thought, wow, this is really where true art began, true modern human artistic culture,” Brumm said.
Recent discoveries in Indonesia, he said, show that humans outside Europe were making “incredibly sophisticated” cave art tens of thousands of years earlier, “before our species ever even set foot in that part of the world.”
Brumm said the discovery was also interesting because it may shed light on when the first humans arrived in his home country, Australia.
Though Aboriginal peoples are widely accepted as having been in Australia for at least 50,000 years, one archaeological site in the country is said to be 65,000 years old.
“Now that we’re finding rock art dating to 67-68,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi, which is essentially on Australia’s doorstep, it does make it considerably more likely that modern humans indeed were in Australia at least 65,000 years ago,” Brumm said.
