A fragment of charcoal on stone — small enough to hold in one hand — carries one of the oldest confirmed dates of any rock art found anywhere on the planet. Excavated from the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in southwest Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory, it has been dated at approximately 28,000 years old, placing Aboriginal rock art among the earliest known visual records of human experience.
Key findings
- Aboriginal rock art: The charcoal drawing on a small rock fragment from Narwala Gabarnmang is dated at around 28,000 years old, making it one of the oldest confirmed pieces of rock art on Earth.
- Pilbara engravings: Rock art in Western Australia’s Pilbara region and the Olary district of South Australia carries estimates of up to around 40,000 years old — though these have not yet received the same level of confirmed dating.
- Continuous tradition: Australian Aboriginal art is widely regarded as the oldest unbroken artistic tradition in the world, spanning tens of thousands of years from ancient rock shelters to contemporary bark paintings and ceremonial objects.
What the shelter revealed
Narwala Gabarnmang is a rock shelter in the Jawoyn country of southwest Arnhem Land. During excavation, researchers found a small rock fragment bearing a charcoal drawing that had fallen from the ceiling. Radiometric dating placed it at around 28,000 years old — a confirmed date that puts it in rare company among the world’s earliest rock art.
The fragment is thought to have once been part of a larger ceiling artwork, though the shape of the original motif has been lost. What survives is still remarkable: evidence that people were making deliberate, skilled marks on stone in Australia at a time when much of Europe was deep in the last Ice Age.
Researchers believe the tradition almost certainly predates even this find. Unconfirmed estimates for engravings and paintings in the Pilbara region of Western Australia reach as far back as 40,000 years. The 28,000-year date is not a beginning — it is the earliest point the record has been firmly pinned down.
A tradition that never stopped
What makes Aboriginal rock art exceptional is not just its age. It is the continuity. The same Arnhem Land shelters that contain ancient paintings also hold works from thousands of years later — some depicting dugongs, thylacines, and bilbies now long extinct from the region. Others show the arrival of Macassan fishing boats from Southeast Asia. A few appear to record the first European ships.
In 2021, a study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour radiometrically dated a large painting of a macropod — a kangaroo-like animal — in Western Australia’s Kimberley region at approximately 17,300 years old. This remains the oldest reliably dated in-place rock art motif in Australia. The Kimberley shelters also hold the Gwion Gwion figures, elegant human forms dated to around 12,000 years ago, as well as the Maliwawa Figures documented in 2020, estimated to be between 6,000 and 9,400 years old.
Meanwhile, at sites including Ubirr in Kakadu National Park, Uluru, and Carnarvon Gorge, rock art layers from multiple eras sit side by side — not as a museum record but as a living record, maintained by communities whose descendants are still on country today.
The rock engravings at Murujuga in Western Australia are said to be the world’s largest collection of petroglyphs, with images of extinct animals including the thylacine etched into the stone over tens of thousands of years.
Beyond rock — a vast creative world
Rock painting and engraving are only one part of a creative tradition that extends across dozens of media. Aboriginal Australians have long worked in bark painting, wood carving, ceremonial clothing, sculpture, weaving, and sand painting. Each tradition carries its own visual language. The widely recognized dot painting style, for instance, is associated with Central Australian desert communities and does not represent the full breadth of Aboriginal visual art — which varies dramatically across different language groups and regions.
Bark painting, using ochres on dried tree bark, dates back at least to the early contact period. Painted bark baskets and coffins were used in death rituals on Melville and Bathurst Islands. In Arnhem Land, artists developed distinct cross-hatching patterns — known as rarrk — and X-ray style depictions of animals that showed internal organs alongside external form. These are not ancient curiosities. They are active traditions, still practiced and still evolving.
The visual symbols used across Aboriginal art vary so widely among different peoples and communities that no single style can represent them all. The diversity is the point — it reflects a continent inhabited for tens of thousands of years by hundreds of distinct peoples, each with their own country, language, and law.
Lasting impact
The confirmation of Aboriginal rock art’s age has reshaped how historians and archaeologists understand the development of human symbolic thinking. For much of the twentieth century, the conventional story of art’s origins was told primarily through European caves — Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet. The accumulating evidence from Australia has complicated that story significantly.
It suggests that the impulse to make meaning through visual marks is not confined to one region or lineage. It appears, rather, to be a deep human capacity — one that Aboriginal Australians exercised with extraordinary sophistication at least 28,000 years ago, and almost certainly much earlier.
The tradition also carries practical significance for contemporary Indigenous Australian communities. Art has long been inseparable from law, ceremony, and the transmission of knowledge about country. Contemporary bark paintings, sculptures, and works on paper continue that function — connecting living communities to the longest artistic lineage in the world.
Blindspots and limits
The confirmed dating of 28,000 years should not be read as the origin of the tradition — it is the oldest date that has been firmly established with current methods, and older art almost certainly existed. The rock art record is also uneven: what survives is what the environment protected, and large portions of the original artistic output have been lost to weathering, flooding, and erosion over millennia. Colonial-era documentation of Aboriginal art was frequently done without the knowledge, consent, or involvement of the communities whose work was being recorded — a history that still shapes ongoing debates over cultural ownership, access, and representation.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Indigenous Australian art — Wikipedia
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights win at COP30: 160 million hectares secured
- Rhinos return to Uganda’s Kidepo Valley after decades away
- The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory
About this article
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