A red stencil of a hand pressed against the wall of an Indonesian cave is the oldest rock art ever found, scientists said Wednesday, and sheds light on how humans migrated to Australia.
The rock art is at least 67,800 years old, according to research Published in the journal Nature A team of Indonesian and Australian archaeologists.
“We have been working in Indonesia for a long time,” study author Maxime Aubert of Australia’s Griffith University told AFP.
This time they ventured into the caves of Muna Island in the province of Sulawesi on the advice of the Indonesian archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, the main author of the study.
There “handprints were found on the negative, stencils, probably using red ochre,” Aubert said.
The fingers of one of the hands “were touched up to become sharp like claws, a style of painting seen only in Sulawesi,” added the Canadian archaeologist.
Study co-author Adam Brumm he told Reuters the claw-shaped design “had a deeper cultural meaning but we don’t know what it was.”
“I suspect it had something to do with the complex symbolic relationship these ancient peoples have with the animal world,” Brumm told Reuters.
Maxime Aubert/Handout via Reuters 
To determine the age of the art, the team took five-millimeter samples of “cave popcorn,” which are small clumps of calcite that form on limestone cave walls.
They then blasted layers of rock with a laser to measure how uranium decays over time, compared to the more stable radioactive element called thorium.
This “very precise” technique gave the scientists a clear minimum age for the painting, Aubert explained.
At 67,800 years old, the Indonesian stencil is more than a thousand years older than other hand stencils found in a Spanish cave attributed to Neanderthals. However, the dating of this rock art “has been controversial”, as the study notes.
The new discovery is more than 15,000 years older than previous art found by the same team in the Sulawesi region.
Scientists also found that the Muna caves were used many times for rock art over a long period of time.
Some of the ancient art was even painted up to 35,000 later, Aubert said.
A crossroads
In addition to setting a new record, the art also offers clues to a long-standing historical mystery.
Scientists are divided on how Homo sapiens first traveled from Asia to Australia.
They could take the northern route, sailing through the Indonesian islands including Sulawesi to Papua New Guinea.
These ancient humans could have walked the rest of the way — at the time, Papua New Guinea and Australia were both part of a supercontinent called Sahul.
Or the migrants could take the southern route, traveling through the islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali before heading to Timor. Then he had to go by boat to finally go to Australia.
“These paintings provide the first evidence that modern humans were present on these Indonesian islands at that time,” Aubert said.
The discovery “also reinforces the idea that people arrived in Australia from Papua, perhaps around 65,000 years ago,” he said.
But it cannot be ruled out that other people were also making their way to Australia via the southern route at the same time, he added.
The researchers also said the paintings were likely created by people with close ties to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians.
In 2018, Aubert led a team of scientists who discovered it the earliest example of animal drawing: a red silhouette of a bull-like beast on the wall of another cave in Indonesia. The researchers said the sketch was at least 40,000 years old, slightly older than similar ones. animal paintings Found in famous caves in France and Spain.
There have also been cave paintings of prehistoric marine life – more than 30,000 years old. It is found at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France