Hand stencil made almost 68,000 years ago is the oldest cave art ever found

The hand stencil is more than 15,000 years older than a painting in another cave on Sulawesi that the same team dated in 2024. That painting, which depicted three human-like figures interacting with a pig, is thought to be about 51,200 years old.

“I thought we were doing pretty well then, but this one image just completely blew that other one away,” Brumm said.

“It really just shows how long people have been making rock art in that part of the world,” he said. “It’s a very long time.”

Researchers hope to find even older art, including storytelling art, in and around Indonesia, much of which remains archaeologically unexplored, he added.

Liang Metanduno is a well-known site for cave art that is open to tourists. But most of the art found so far is paintings depicting chickens and other domesticated animals that are thought to be much more recent, about 4,000 years old.

In 2015, Indonesian rock art specialist Adhi Oktaviana, the paper’s lead author, noticed faint images behind more recent ones that he thought could be hand stencils.

“No one had ever observed them before. No one even knew that they were there,” Brumm said. “But Adhi spotted them.”

For generations, researchers studying Ice Age cave paintings in places like France and Spain, which are about 30,000 to 40,000 years old, “thought, wow, this is really where true art began, true modern human artistic culture,” Brumm said.

Recent discoveries in Indonesia, he said, show that humans outside Europe were making “incredibly sophisticated” cave art tens of thousands of years earlier, “before our species ever even set foot in that part of the world.”

Brumm said the discovery was also interesting because it may shed light on when the first humans arrived in his home country of Australia.

Though Aboriginal peoples are widely accepted as being in Australia for at least 50,000 years, one archaeological site in the country is said to be 65,000 years old.

“Now that we’re finding rock art dating to 67-68,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi, which is essentially on Australia’s doorstep, it does make it considerably more likely that modern humans indeed were in Australia at least 65,000 years ago,” Brumm said.