A faded outline of a human hand found on a cave wall in Indonesia may officially be the oldest known rock art in the world, according to archaeologists who say it was created at least 67,800 years ago.
The ancient hand stencil was discovered inside a limestone cave on Muna Island, part of southeastern Sulawesi — a location that’s surprisingly popular with tourists. Despite being surrounded by newer cave paintings of animals and figures, the hand shape had gone unnoticed until now.
Researchers believe the stencil was created by placing a hand against the cave wall and spraying pigment around it, leaving behind its unmistakable outline. “They’re made with ochre. They put their hand there, and then they sprayed pigment. We can’t tell which technique they used. They could have put pigment in their mouth and sprayed it. They could have used some sort of instrument,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist from Griffith University in Australia.
Aubert, who served as the senior author of the study published Wednesday in Nature, described the discovery as both exciting and meaningful. He called it “thrilling and humbling.”
Dating ancient rock art is notoriously difficult, but in this case, scientists analyzed tiny calcite deposits that had formed over the stencil, allowing them to determine a minimum age for the artwork. “There’s a lot of rock art out there but it’s really difficult to date,” Aubert previously explained.
What makes this hand stencil especially intriguing is that its fingers appear narrowed and pointed, a modification researchers believe was intentional. Similar hand shapes have been found in other caves across Sulawesi, suggesting a shared artistic or symbolic tradition among early humans in the region.
“What we are seeing in Indonesia is probably not a series of isolated surprises, but the gradual revealing of a much deeper and older cultural tradition that has simply been invisible to us until recently,” Aubert said. “When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world. It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”
The finding also plays into larger questions about human migration, particularly how early humans traveled from Southeast Asia to Australia. While land bridges existed due to lower sea levels at the time, people would still have needed to island-hop across areas like Sulawesi to reach the ancient landmass known as Sahul.
According to Adam Brumm, another Griffith University archaeologist involved in the research, the artwork supports evidence that humans reached northern Australia at least 65,000 years ago. “Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know, but there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them,” Brumm said of the altered fingers.
Still, not all experts agree on how the artwork should be interpreted. Paul Pettitt, a professor at Durham University who has studied similar cave art in Spain, cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions. “To call this complex is rather over-interpreting the hand stencil,” he said.
“In any case, Neanderthals were modifying hand stencils, so why this should be a behaviour restricted to Homo sapiens, and why other potential human groups such as the poorly understood Denisovans couldn’t have created it, is unclear,” Pettitt added. “Before writing grand narratives about the complexity and success of Homo sapiens, we really should consider other, potentially more interesting explanations of this fascinating phenomenon.”
