These ancient handprints from Indonesia may represent some of the world’s first rock art about 70,000 years old

Amazing stuff!

"Brown-pigmented hand stencils found on the walls of caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and dated to at least 67,800 years ago may be the oldest known examples of rock art in the world. The paintings—reported today in Nature—indicate that Sulawesi was a waypoint for early migrants to the greater region known as Sahul, which once connected Australia and New Guinea. ...

If the dates hold up, they would predate the oldest known Neanderthal paintings in Europe by about 1000 years. In some cases, similar motifs are found in the Sulawesi caves that are separated by tens of thousands of years, indicating a remarkable degree of continuity in the artistic culture of the islands’ early inhabitants. ..."

From the abstract:

"The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo.

Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide.

Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective."

These ancient handprints may represent some of the world’s first rock art | Science | AAAS

Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi (open access)

Fig. 1: Map of Sulawesi and the wider region.

Fig. 2 Fig. 2: Dated rock art from Liang Metanduno.