Sometime around 40,000 years ago, people made their home on an island that would one day be called Borneo. They were not lost wanderers. They were skilled hunters, careful observers, and — as the walls of their caves now prove — artists.
What the evidence shows
- Borneo cave art: A figurative painting of a wild cattle species in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave, East Kalimantan, has been dated to at least 40,000 B.C.E., placing it among the oldest known figurative artworks on Earth.
- Niah Cave fossils: Human remains recovered from Niah Cave in Sarawak have been dated to roughly 40,000–45,000 B.C.E., providing direct skeletal evidence of early settlement on the island.
- Human migration routes: Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests these early Borneans were part of a broader southward movement of modern humans through Southeast Asia, likely crossing land bridges exposed by lower sea levels during the last glacial period.
An island within reach
During the last glacial maximum, sea levels across Southeast Asia were dramatically lower than they are today. The shallow continental shelf known as Sundaland connected what are now Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula into a single vast landmass. Early humans did not have to cross open ocean to reach Borneo — they walked there.
This matters. It means the settlement of Borneo was not an isolated event but part of a continuous expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa and across South and Southeast Asia. The Natural History Museum in London notes that modern humans had reached Australia by at least 50,000 B.C.E., meaning populations were moving through the region across a broad timeframe. Borneo sat squarely on that path.
The people who arrived brought with them fire, stone tools, and — crucially — the cognitive capacity for symbolic thought. They were, by every biological measure, fully modern humans.
Art on the cave walls
The most astonishing evidence of early Bornean life was confirmed in 2018 C.E., when researchers published uranium-series dating results for a figurative animal painting in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave. The study, published in Nature, dated the image of a large bovid — likely a banteng, a species still found in Borneo — to a minimum age of 40,000 years. At the time of publication, it was the oldest known figurative painting anywhere in the world.
That record has since been challenged by findings in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where a cave painting of a pig has been dated to at least 45,500 years ago. The two discoveries together point to a remarkable conclusion: the earliest flowering of figurative art in human history did not happen in Europe. It happened in island Southeast Asia.
What drove people to paint? No one can say with certainty. But the act itself — climbing into a cave, mixing pigment, choosing an animal worth depicting — reflects minds rich with meaning, memory, and imagination.
Who these people were
The earliest inhabitants of Borneo were not the ancestors of today’s majority populations. Genomic research suggests they were related to the Australo-Melanesian peoples who eventually reached Australia and New Guinea. Much later — roughly 3,000 to 4,000 years ago — Austronesian-speaking agriculturalists arrived from the north, bringing rice cultivation and reshaping the island’s demographics.
Today, Borneo is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic groups, including the Dayak peoples, whose traditions carry deep roots stretching back across millennia of continuous habitation. The knowledge systems, ecological relationships, and artistic traditions that survive in these communities represent an unbroken thread reaching toward those first cave-painters.
Indigenous Bornean communities today face significant pressures from deforestation and land conversion — a reminder that the story of human settlement is always also a story about the land itself.
Lasting impact
The settlement of Borneo ~40,000 B.C.E. sits within one of the most consequential chapters in human history: the peopling of the Asia-Pacific. The descendants of these early migrants eventually reached the Philippines, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, spreading languages, technologies, and knowledge systems across half the planet.
The cave art they left behind reshaped our understanding of where human creativity first emerged. For decades, scholars assumed Europe — with its famous paintings at Lascaux and Altamira — was the cradle of figurative art. The Borneo and Sulawesi findings demolished that assumption. Symbolic art appears to have been part of the human toolkit long before any particular regional tradition flourished.
It also means that when we ask where art began, the honest answer is: many places, simultaneously, in minds that were already fully capable of wonder.
Blindspots and limits
The 40,000 B.C.E. date should be understood as a lower bound, not a fixed point. Habitation may have begun earlier, and much evidence has almost certainly been lost to the tropical environment, rising sea levels, and the dense vegetation that covers Borneo’s cave-rich interior. Archaeological survey of the island remains incomplete, and research access to remote areas has historically been limited. What has been found likely represents a fraction of what once existed.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Lonely Planet — Borneo history
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous communities secure rights to 160 million hectares at COP30
- Rhinos return to Uganda’s Kidepo Valley after decades away
- The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory
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