THE discovery of a faded hand outline on a cave wall in Indonesia may represent the world’s oldest known rock art, rewriting human history
Archaeologists believe the artwork dates back at least 67,800 years.
That places it around 1,100 years earlier than the previous record-holder – a controversial hand stencil found in Spain.
If confirmed, the Indonesian print would stand alone as the earliest surviving mark left by a human hand.
The ancient handprint was uncovered inside a well-known limestone cave on Muna Island, in south-eastern Sulawesi.
Despite the cave’s popularity and the abundance of other paintings, the stencil somehow escaped expert attention for decades.
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Time had taken its toll.
The hand is faded and partially obscured by a more recent motif painted over it.
Fortunately, scientists were able to unlock its age by analysing microscopic calcite deposits that had slowly formed on top of the image across tens of thousands of years.
This ground-breaking discovery adds weight to new thinking about how – and when – Australia was first settled.
Researchers believe the stencil was created by the ancestors of Indigenous Australians, suggesting that early humans were moving across vast distances far earlier than once thought.
The find also strengthens the argument that our species, Homo sapiens, had reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass, known as Sahul, by around 15,000 years earlier than some researchers have argued.
“There’s a lot of rock art out there but it’s really difficult to date,” said Professor Maxine Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland.
“When you can date it, it opens a completely different world.
“It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”
Fieldwork led by Aubert and fellow archaeologist Professor Adam Brumm has revealed a rich tapestry of cave art across Sulawesi, particularly on the island’s south-western peninsula.
The paintings depict animals, human-like figures and mysterious scenes whose meanings have been lost to time.
In another cave, researchers documented a striking scene showing three human-like figures interacting with a wild pig, dated to at least 51,200 years ago.
Humans have been producing cave paintings for millennia, but such images are far more than decoration.
Cave art is widely seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract and symbolic ways – when ideas, beliefs and stories began to be preserved beyond the spoken word.
The newly identified hand stencils were created by spraying mouthfuls of ochre mixed with water over a hand pressed against the cave wall, leaving behind a ghostly silhouette once the hand was removed.
Like several others found nearby, this stencil features unusually narrow, pointed fingers – a detail researchers believe was deliberately modified rather than accidental.
“Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know, but there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them,” Brumm said.
The researchers argue that such deliberate alterations make the artwork “complex”, and therefore most likely the work of Homo sapiens.
The choices behind the image suggest intention, imagination and shared meaning.
However, the possibility that other long-extinct human species were involved cannot be ruled out.
In Spain, archaeologists working in caves have dated ochre wall markings — including hand stencils – to at least 64,000 years ago, well before modern humans arrived in Europe.
Those images are thought to be the work of Neanderthals, raising the tantalising possibility that symbolic art was not uniquely human after all.
