The oldest rock art was painted in Indonesia 67,000 years ago

BarcelonaThe oldest known story told in images was drawn in a cave on the island of Sulawesi (Celebes, in the local language), in Indonesia, and dates back at least 67,800 years. It is a stencil of a hand, surrounded by other figures painted later, making it 15,000 years older than any other known story. the previous archaeological find found in the same cave in IndonesiaAs reported by the Efe news agency, the magazine Nature This Wednesday, the description of these cave paintings was published, reinforcing the theory that the first humans migrated to Sahul (a supercontinent that in the Pleistocene encompassed what is now mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and several adjacent islands) via a route.

The discovery was made by an international team of researchers who have been studying the area for yearsThe team, led by archaeologist Maxime Aubert, is working on the project in Sulawesi. They have studied caves across the island's southeast, documenting 44 sites, including 14 previously unknown locations. Applying the latest uranium-series dating techniques, using high-resolution lasers on calcium carbonate deposits that formed above and below the paintings, has yielded a date of up to 67,800 years. This indicates that the Sulawesi cave was used to create art over an exceptionally long period, with paintings produced repeatedly for at least 35,000 years. The most recent paintings date back 20,000 years and demonstrate a long tradition of storytelling through images during the Late Pleistocene.

A hand shaped like a staple

Among the painted motifs are seven hand stencils and a brown-pigmented human figure that may represent the oldest evidence of cultural expression in the region. The hand stencil is a unique variant of this motif: "Once created, it was modified to deliberately narrow the contours of the fingers and give the overall impression of a claw-like hand," notes one of the authors, Adam Brumm, a human evolution researcher at Griffith University. "This type of hand may symbolize the idea that humans and animals were closely connected, something that already seems to be seen in the earliest pictorial art of Sulawesi, with at least one example of a scene depicting figures that we interpret as beings that are half-human, half-animal," Brumm explains in a statement from the center.

Researcher Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a rock art specialist at the Indonesian Institute of Natural History (BRIN), believes that "it is very likely that the people who made these paintings were part of a larger population that later spread throughout the region and eventually reached present-day Australia."

The timing of human occupation of this Pleistocene landmass known as Sahul has been the subject of intense archaeological debate, with two main schools of thought arguing that the first inhabitants arrived 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, respectively. Researchers proposed two main migration routes to Sahul: a northern route, towards what is now New Guinea via the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and a more southerly route that led navigators to the Australian continent via what is now Timor or the adjacent islands. The dating of the cave paintings published this Wednesday "reinforces the idea that the ancestors of the first Australians arrived in Sahul at least 65,000 years ago via the northern route," says Oktaviana. The new discoveries on the island of Sulawesi continue to strengthen the idea that cave art developed and evolved in parallel in several places around the world. In Europe, the oldest animals found so far were drawn in the Chauvet Cave in France more than 30,000 years ago.