A 67,800-year-old hand stencil discovered in an Indonesian cave has been revealed as the world’s oldest known rock art, which researchers now say could help trace the routes early humans once took across the region.
Newly dated cave art in Indonesia is not only the oldest known example of rock art but also a crucial clue to how early humans may have traveled through Southeast Asia on their way to Australia.
Stenciled on a cave wall tens of thousands of years ago, the work provides important new clues about how Pleistocene populations reached Australia from Asia in the remote past. The international team that discovered and analyzed the rock art included experts from Griffith University, Indonesia’s national research and innovation agency (BRIN), and Southern Cross University, who revealed their findings in a recent paper published in Nature.
Discovering Ancient Rock Art
The cave where the ancient rock art was found is located on Muna, a small satellite island off southeastern Sulawesi. Sulawesi, one of the Greater Sunda Islands and the 11th-largest island on Earth, is the third most populous island in Indonesia and has a distinctive “K” shape formed by its four long peninsulas.
Found in the cave was the 67,800-year-old fragmentary hand stencil, surrounded by more recent rock art on the same wall. Techniques used to date the piece included uranium-series dating and mineral deposit analysis, allowing researchers to disentangle the ages of the various artworks. Those dates provide another intriguing detail: the cave appears to have served as an art space for at least 35,000 years, ending about 20,000 years ago. This represents an exceptionally long period for such a practice to continue.
Ancient Rock Art Styles
“It is now evident from our new phase of research that Sulawesi was home to one of the world’s richest and most longstanding artistic cultures, one with origins in the earliest history of human occupation of the island at least 67,800 years ago,” said co-author Professor Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist from the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research (GCSCR).
The researchers also identified unique elements in the piece, distinguishing it from other hand stencils worldwide. In this example, after the stencil was created, the finger outlines appear to have been narrowed to more closely resemble a claw.
“This art could symbolise the idea that humans and animals were closely connected, something we already seem to see in the very early painted art of Sulawesi, with at least one instance of a scene portraying figures that we interpret as representations of part-human, part-animal beings,” said co-author Professor Adam Brumm, from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE).
Australian Pleistocene Connections
Analyzing the rock art suggests that the population that made it is likely closely linked to the one that eventually settled Australia, providing new clues about how the continent came to be populated.
“It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia,” said co-author Dr Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a rock art specialist in BRIN.
During the Pleistocene, Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea formed one large landmass known as Sahul. Scholars debate whether humans first entered Sahul around 50,000 years ago or as far back as 65,000 years ago.
“This discovery strongly supports the idea that the ancestors of the First Australians were in Sahul by 65,000 years ago,” Dr Oktaviana said.
Ancient Rock Art Clues
Among the possible migration routes, researchers have narrowed the most likely paths to either a northern route to New Guinea via Sulawesi or a southern route directly to Australia via Timor or other nearby islands. The new research provides strong support for proponents of the Sulawesi route.
“With the dating of this extremely ancient rock art in Sulawesi, we now have the oldest direct evidence for the presence of modern humans along this northern migration corridor into Sahul,” said co-author Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau from the Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry Research Group (GARG) at Southern Cross University.
“These discoveries underscore the archaeological importance of the many other Indonesian islands between Sulawesi and westernmost New Guinea,” concluded Professor Aubert.
Aubert and Joannes-Boyau are not done yet. Funded by the Australian Research Council, the pair plan to continue their search for early human art and occupation along this hypothesized northern route through Sulawesi to Australia.
The paper, “World’s Oldest Rock Art Holds Clues to Early Human Migration to Australia,” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 21, 2025.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.