Hand stencils in Sulawesi caves may be the world’s oldest known art

Story: ~40,000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 3, 0001

Somewhere in a limestone cave on Muna Island, Indonesia, a person once pressed a hand against a rock wall and blew red ochre over it. Scientists have now dated that act to at least 67,800 years ago — placing it among the earliest confirmed examples of symbolic human expression ever recorded.

Key findings

• Sulawesi cave art: Uranium-series dating of calcite deposits overlying the hand stencil at Liang Metanduno cave places it at a minimum of 67,800 years old — more than 30,000 years older than the famous painted caves of France and Spain.
• Hand stencil: The image is unusual even among ancient art. Its fingers were deliberately shaped to appear narrow and pointed, like animal claws — a style unique to Sulawesi that suggests intentional symbolic meaning beyond simply marking a presence.
• Human migration route: Sulawesi sits along the northern corridor researchers believe early humans followed as they moved from mainland Southeast Asia toward Sahul, the ancient landmass connecting Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania — making these cave artists likely ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians and Papuans.

How scientists read time inside a cave wall

The dating method is called uranium-series analysis. It works by measuring how uranium naturally decays into thorium inside thin calcite crusts that form over rock surfaces across thousands of years.

Because these mineral layers grow on top of paintings, their age sets the youngest possible date for the art beneath. When paintings also sit on top of older mineral layers, those establish the oldest possible date. Together, they bracket the moment of creation with considerable precision.

The research team, led by Professors Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Australia, collected microscopic samples from caves across Sulawesi. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, pushed the confirmed creative record back by more than 15,000 years beyond what earlier Sulawesi studies had shown.

“When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world,” Aubert said. “It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”

Rewriting the story of where art began

For much of the 20th century, the dominant narrative was clear: complex symbolic art began in Western Europe. The painted caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain — their walls covered in bison, bulls, and horses — were treated as the birthplace of the human creative mind.

That story was already under pressure before this discovery. Earlier Sulawesi research had dated narrative hunting scenes — including figures with animal heads and a wild pig — to at least 43,900 years ago. These were not simple marks. They required planning, shared meaning, and symbolic thought.

The new dates push that challenge much further. They place fully symbolic art-making in Southeast Asia at a time when modern humans had only recently begun spreading out of Africa. The roots of symbolic behavior almost certainly stretch back further still — most probably into Africa itself, where Homo sapiens originated. What the Sulawesi caves show is that by the time humans reached this part of the world, they were already carrying rich cultural traditions with them.

Who made it — and is that even certain?

The researchers argue the pointed, modified fingers make the art “complex” enough to suggest Homo sapiens authorship. But not everyone agrees, and the science is honest about this.

Professor Paul Pettitt of Durham University, who has worked on ochre wall markings in Spanish caves dated to at least 64,000 years ago — work attributed to Neanderthals — points out that Neanderthals were also modifying hand stencils. The related Denisovans, a lesser-known human species, occupied a vast stretch of Asia and may have reached as far as Indonesia. The possibility that another human lineage created the Sulawesi art cannot be ruled out.

“Before writing grand narratives about the complexity and success of Homo sapiens, we really should consider other, potentially more interesting explanations of this fascinating phenomenon,” Pettitt said.

That uncertainty doesn’t diminish the find. If anything, it deepens it — raising the possibility that the capacity for symbolic expression may have been shared across multiple branches of the human family tree.

Lasting impact

The geographic location of these caves matters as much as their age. Sulawesi sits directly along the route researchers believe early humans took as they crossed open water to reach ancient Australia and New Guinea — one of the most extraordinary feats of navigation in human prehistory. The rock art supports evidence that northern Australia was settled at least 65,000 years ago, a timeline consistent with archaeological finds at Madjedbebe in the Northern Territory.

The discovery also matters for how humanity understands itself. For generations, the story of “where art was born” centered on Europe. The Sulawesi findings — built on more than a decade of fieldwork, much of it in collaboration with local communities and Indonesian researchers — show that tradition was always too narrow. The first ocean crossers, the first hand-printers, the first people to modify their image into something part-human and part-animal, were here too, tens of thousands of years earlier.

The work also sheds light on the ancestors of Indigenous Australians and Papuans specifically — people whose deep connection to land, story, and image extends back further than almost any other living cultural tradition on Earth.

Blindspots and limits

The 67,800-year date is a minimum, not an exact age — the painting itself could be considerably older than the calcite crust above it. Dating ancient pigment directly remains technically difficult, and the scholarly debate over whether the pointed fingers were intentional or accidental is unresolved. The record of early symbolic behavior in Africa — where ochre use and shell beads push the evidence back to at least 100,000 years ago — is also underrepresented in these discussions, partly because organic materials survive less well in tropical and semi-arid environments. What Sulawesi confirms is a chapter, not the whole story.

Read more

For more on this story, see: The Guardian

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares protected ahead of COP30
• Ghana establishes new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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