The tan-coloured images, studied by Indonesian and Australian researchers, were created by blowing pigment over hands placed against cave walls, leaving outlined prints, the scientists said on Wednesday
Archaeologists say handprints stencilled on limestone caves on Indonesia’s Muna Island may be up to 67,800 years old, making them the oldest known paintings in the world.
The tan-coloured images, studied by Indonesian and Australian researchers, were created by blowing pigment over hands placed against cave walls, leaving outlined prints, the scientists said on Wednesday.
According to The Jakarta Post, archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) has been searching for hand stencils in the Muna Island area of Sulawesi province since 2015.
Adhi discovered the newly dated hand stencils beneath later cave paintings depicting a person riding a horse alongside a chicken. He said it was initially difficult to convince his colleagues that the markings were human hands, but he eventually identified areas that clearly resembled fingers.
Some of the fingertips were deliberately altered to appear more pointed.
“The oldest hand stencil described here is distinctive because it belongs to a style found only in Sulawesi,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeological science specialist at Australia’s Griffith University and a co-leader of the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them appear pointed.”
Aubert’s co-author, Adam Brumm, also an archaeologist at Griffith University, said the artists may have been attempting to represent something beyond a human hand.
“It was almost as if they were deliberately trying to transform this image of a human hand into something else perhaps an animal claw,” Brumm said.
“Clearly, these images carried a deeper cultural meaning, although we do not yet know what that was. I suspect it relates to these ancient peoples’ complex symbolic relationship with the animal world.”
The researchers established a minimum age for the artwork by analysing trace amounts of uranium in mineral layers that formed over the pigment.
After extracting five-millimetre samples of calcite deposits from the cave walls, they used a laser to measure how the uranium had decayed over time compared with thorium, a more stable radioactive element.
This highly precise method provided a clear minimum age for the paintings, Aubert said.
The team also found that the Muna caves were used repeatedly for rock art over tens of thousands of years, with some images painted over as much as 35,000 years later.
The newly dated hand stencils are more than 15,000 years older than previous cave art discovered in Sulawesi by the same research team in 2024.
Indonesia and its surrounding region, including East Timor and Australia, are known for hosting some of the world’s oldest archaeological evidence.
Adhi said the cave art offers fresh support for theories of early human migration through Sulawesi.
“It also shows that our ancestors were not only skilled sailors,” he said, as quoted by The Jakarta Post, “but also artists.”
Australia’s Aboriginal peoples are recognised as having one of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures, with archaeological evidence dating back at least 60,000 years.
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