Indonesia and the surrounding region are known for some of the oldest archaeological finds in the world.
Archaeologists have found that handprints on limestone caves on Muna Island may be 67,800 years old, making them the oldest known paintings in the world.
The tan-colored drawings analyzed by Indonesian and Australian researchers were created by blowing pigment onto hands placed against the cave walls, leaving an outline, scientists said Wednesday.
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Archaeologist Adhi Agus Octaviana from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) has been searching for hand stencils in the Muna Island region of Sulawesi province since 2015, the Jakarta Post reported.
Adhi found hand stencils, now obsolete, in a cave of a man riding a horse alongside chickens.
At first, Adhi said his co-researchers found it difficult to prove that the stencils were hands as he believed, but “eventually he found some spots that looked like human fingers”.
Some fingertips were also tweaked for a more edgy look.
“The earliest hand stencil described here is unique because it corresponds to a style found only in Sulawesi,” said Maxime Aubert, an archeology expert at Griffith University in Australia who led the research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them look pointed,” Aubert said.
Aubert’s co-author, Adam Brum, also an archaeologist at Griffith University, said it seems likely that the people painting the hands were trying to depict something else.
“It’s almost like they’re trying to transform this image of a human hand into something else — maybe an animal claw,” Brumm said.
“Clearly, they had some deep cultural meaning, but we don’t know what it was. I suspect it had something to do with the complex symbolic relationship these ancient people had with the animal world,” he said.
The researchers determined the minimum age of the image by analyzing trace amounts of the element uranium in the mineral layers that slowly build up on top of the pigment.
After taking five-millimeter samples of tiny clusters of calcite formed on the walls of limestone caves, the researchers zapped rock layers with a laser to measure how uranium decayed over time, compared to a more stable radioactive element called thorium.
This “very precise” technique gave scientists a clear minimum age for the painting, Aubert said.
Scientists have also established that the Muna Caves have been used for rock art many times over a long period of time. Some ancient art was still painted 35,000 years later, Aubert said.
The new find is also older than 15,000 years Prior art In 2024, the same team found it in the Sulawesi region.
The region around Indonesia is known for some of the oldest archaeological finds in the neighboring world East Timor and Australia.
Adhi said the cave art provides new evidence to support the theory of early human migration from Sulawesi.
According to the Jakarta Post, “This shows that our ancestors were not only great sailors, but also artists.”
The Aboriginal people living in Australia have the oldest intact living culture on Earth, documented by archaeological evidence dating back at least 60,000 years.
At Murujuga in northwest Australia, an estimated one million petroglyphs – ancient cave paintings – including stone carvings, possibly dating back to 50,000 yearswas Recently added On the UNESCO World Heritage List.