The oldest cave painting may rewrite the origins of human creativity

A stenciled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the oldest known cave painting in the world, researchers say.

It shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers have been reworked, the researchers say, to create a claw-like motif that indicates an early leap in symbolic imagination.

The painting is dated to at least 67,800 years ago – about 1,100 years before the previous record holder, a controversial hand stencil in Spain.

The finding also strengthens the argument that our species, Homo sapiens, reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass, known as Sahul, about 15,000 years earlier than some researchers have argued.

Over the past decade, a series of discoveries in Sulawesi have overturned the old idea that the art and abstract thinking of our species suddenly burst into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there.

Cave art is seen as a significant sign of when people began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways – the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science.

Early paintings and sculptures show humans not only reacting to the world, but representing it, sharing stories and identities in a way that no other species knows.

Professor Adam Brumm of Griffiths University in Australia, who co-led the project, told BBC News, that the latest discovery, published in the journal Natureadded to the emerging view that there was no awakening for the people of Europe. Rather, creativity is inherent to our species, the evidence of which comes from Africa, where we evolved.

“When I went to university in the mid-late 90s, that’s what we were taught – the creative explosion of people took place in a small part of Europe. But now we see the characteristics of modern human behavior, including the narrative art of Indonesia, which makes that Eurocentric argument difficult to maintain”.

The oldest Spanish cave art is a red hand stencil in the Maltravieso cave in Western Spain, which has been dated to be at least 66,700 years old – although this is controversial and some experts do not think it is that old.

In 2014, hand stencils and animal figures dating back at least 40,000 years were found in Sulawesi, followed by a hunting scene at least 44,000 years old, and then a narrative pig and human painting dated at least 51,200 years ago. Each step pushes sophisticated image processing further over time, according to Professor Maxime Aubert of Griffiths University.

“We start with a minimum age of at least 40,000 years, the same time as Europe, but by getting closer to the pigment we push the rock art of Sulawesi to at least 28,000 years”.

The latest discovery is from a limestone cave called Liang Metanduno in Muna, a small island in southeastern Sulawesi. It was spray-painted: an ancient graffiti artist pressed their hand flat against the cave wall, then blew or spat a mouthful of pigment around it so that, when they pulled the hand away, a negative outline was left on the rock.

A fragment of a hand stencil there was covered in thin mineral crusts that, when analyzed, were found to have a minimum age of 67,800 years, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art anywhere in the world.

Most importantly, the artist did more than spray pigment around a hand pressed against the wall, the researchers said.

After the original stencil was created, the outlines of the fingers were carefully modified – narrowed and lengthened to make them look like claws; a creative change that Brumm says is “something we’ll do”.

He noted that there is no evidence of that experimentation in any of the art that our sister species, Neanderthals, did in their cave paintings in Spain about 64,000 years ago. Even that is hotly contested as some researchers question the dating method.

Until this latest discovery in Muna, all paintings in Sulawesi came from the Maros Pangkep karst in the southwest of the island. The fact that this older stencil is found on the opposite side of Sulawesi, on a separate satellite island, suggests that creating images on cave walls was not a local experiment but deeply embedded in cultures that spread throughout the region.

Brumm says the colleagues’ years of fieldwork in Indonesia have revealed “hundreds of new rock art sites” in remote areas, with some caves that have been used repeatedly for tens of thousands of years. At Liang Metanduno, other, younger paintings on the same panel – some dating back to about 20,000 years ago – show that this one cave was a focus for artistic activity spanning at least 35,000 years.

Because Sulawesi lies on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, the dates have direct implications for assessing when Aboriginal Australian ancestors first arrived.

For years, the mainstream view – based mostly on DNA studies and most archaeological sites – was that Homo sapiens first reached the ancient Australia–New Guinea landmass, Sahul, about 50,000 years ago.

But with strong evidence that Homo sapiens settled in Sulawesi and made complex symbolic art at least 67,800 years ago, it makes it more likely that the controversial archaeological evidence for people in northern Australia at about 65,000 years is correct, according to Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s national research and innovation Agency (BRIN).

“It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of a wider population that later spread through the region and eventually reached Australia.”

Many archaeologists have previously argued for a European “big bang” in mind because cave paintings, carvings, ornaments and new stone tools all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens arrived there.

The amazing Ice Age cave art in places like Altamira and El Castillo inspires the idea that symbolism and art returned almost overnight to Ice Age Europe. Since then, ocher carvings, beads and abstract markings from South African sites such as Blombos Cave, some 70,000–100,000 years old, show that symbolic behavior was established in Africa long ago.

With the very old figurative and narrative paintings from Sulawesi, a new consensus was formed; with a deeper and wider story of creativity, Aubert told BBC News.

“What this suggests is that people have had that capacity for a long time, at least when they left Africa – but probably before that”.