Archaeologists have found that handprints stencilled on limestone caves on the Indonesian island of Muna could be up to 67,800 years old, making them the oldest known paintings in the world.
The tan-coloured drawings analysed by Indonesian and Australian researchers were made by blowing pigment over hands placed against the cave walls, leaving an outline, scientists said on Wednesday.
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According to the Jakarta Post news outlet, archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) has been looking for hand stencils in the Muna island region, in Sulawesi province, since 2015.
Adhi found the hand stencils, which have now been dated, under newer paintings in the cave of a person riding a horse alongside a chicken.
At first, Adhi said it was difficult to prove to his co-researchers that the stencils were hands as he believed, but he “finally found some spots that looked like human fingers”.
Some of the fingertips were also tweaked to look more pointed.
“The oldest hand stencil described here is distinctive because it belongs to a style found only in Sulawesi,” said Maxime Aubert, a specialist in archaeological science at Griffith University in Australia who helped lead the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them appear pointed,” Aubert said.
Aubert’s co-author, Adam Brumm, who is also an archaeologist at Griffith University, said it appeared the people who painted the hands may have been trying to depict something else.
This image provided by Maxime Aubert shows cave drawings in Sulawesi, Indonesia of a human figure and a bird with a faded handprint in between them. (Maxime Aubert via AP)
This image provided by Maxime Aubert shows cave drawings in Sulawesi province, Indonesia, of a human figure and a bird with a faded handprint in between them [Maxime Aubert/AP Photo]
“It was almost as if they were deliberately trying to transform this image of a human hand into something else – an animal claw perhaps,” said Brumm.
“Clearly, they had some deeper cultural meaning, but we don’t know what that was. I suspect it was something to do with these ancient peoples’ complex symbolic relationship with the animal world,” he said.
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The researchers determined the minimum age of the image by analysing small amounts of the element uranium in mineral layers that gradually formed atop the pigment.
After taking five-millimetre samples of small clusters of calcite that formed on the walls of the limestone caves, the researchers then zapped the layers of rock with a laser to measure how the uranium decayed over time, compared to a more stable radioactive element called thorium.
This “very precise” technique gave the scientists a clear minimum age for the painting, Aubert said.
The scientists also established that the Muna caves had been used for rock art many times over a long period. Some of the ancient art was even painted over up to 35,000 years later, Aubert said.
The new discovery is also more than 15,000 years older than the previous art found in the Sulawesi region by the same team in 2024.
The region surrounding Indonesia is known for some of the world’s most ancient archaeological finds, alongside neighbouring East Timor and Australia.
Adhi said the cave art provides new evidence supporting the theory that there was early human migration through Sulawesi.
“It also shows that our ancestors were not only great sailors,” Adhi said, according to the Jakarta Post, “but also artists.”
Aboriginal people living in Australia have one of the oldest continuous living cultures on earth, as documented by archaeological evidence dating back at least 60,000 years.
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