World’s Oldest Known Cave Art Discovered in Indonesian Cave

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Some 67,800 years ago, ancient humans slipped inside a limestone cave in Indonesia and stenciled their hands on the wall—at least that’s what a groundbreaking new study suggests. Recently published in Nature, the article claims that the hand print, which was uncovered on Muna Island in southeastern Sulawesi, is the world’s oldest known cave art.

Sulawesi is home to several caves full of ancient cave art. In one cave, for instance, a prehistoric painting depicting three humans and a wild pig dates back to at least 51,200 years ago. In the same cave, another stencil dates to about 60,900 years ago. This new discovery may be 15,000 years older than the next-oldest cave art, but it was also hiding in plain sight, according to Adam Brumm, a co-author of the study and a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Australia. The stencil was faint and tucked away on the cave’s ceiling, a location where it was overlooked for years.

To date the stencil, researchers used lasers rather than drilling to take samples, allowing them to test a bigger area and land at a more accurate date range. Calcite deposits that had formed over the top of the stencil were also dated by the team. “We knew that they were probably going to be old, but we didn’t know how old,” Maxime Aubert, another co-author of the study, told Scientific American.

The results of the study offer critical insight into the development of human art, joining other ancient cases like 70,000-year-old shell jewelry and a 73,000-year-old cross-hatched piece of rock from South Africa. What distinguishes this new hand stencil, though, is its unusual fingers, which appear pointy and almost claw-like. Researchers believe that the stylistic choice may be indicative of the strong relationship between animals and humans at the time.

“[This is] something we already seem to see in the very early painted art of Sulawesi, with at least one instance of a scene portraying figures that we interpret as representations of part-human, part-animal beings,” Brumm remarked in a statement. He added in The Guardian: “Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know, but there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them.”

“The new results further indicate the importance of Indonesia in the emergence of human figurative and nonfigurative art,” Paul Pettitt, a professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Durham University, added in The New York Times.

But the hand stencil also answers questions about human migration. Archeologists believe that Australia’s first settlers most likely traveled through Indonesia, crossing from Asia 60,000 to 70,000 years ago by island hopping. This new evidence helps scientists hammer down a more definitive timeline, while also unveiling possible routes to Australia.

“It does make it considerably more likely that [Sulawesi] was [part of] the pathway taken by early modern humans to get to Australia,” Brumm concluded.

It’s currently unclear whose hand made the prints, but scientists seem to believe that it was most likely a Homo sapien, rather than a Denisovan or a member of a different ancient human group.

“For us, this discovery is not the end of the story,” Aubert told the Associated Press. “It is an invitation to keep looking.”