Photo: Maxime Aubert

A team of archaeologists from Indonesia and Australia has discovered what could be the oldest known rock art in the world, thanks to paintings found in caves on Muna Island, in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. The main image is a handprint made with red pigment, created by placing a hand against the wall and blowing or applying color around it. This type of technique has been seen at other sites, but none with such a high recorded age until now.

The study, published in the journal Nature, combined advanced uranium dating techniques on mineral deposits that formed above and, in some cases, below the paintings. These deposits allow researchers to estimate the minimum age of the artwork without needing to date the pigment directly, which is usually more difficult to analyze. Thanks to this, they determined that the handprint is at least 67,800 years old, far surpassing other known rock paintings in Europe and other parts of the world.

In addition to the main handprint, excavations have revealed numerous stencils and rock art motifs in different caves across the region, which appear to be part of a continuous artistic tradition. The discovery suggests that these ancient inhabitants of the area possessed highly developed symbolic and expressive abilities, offering a more nuanced understanding of the cultural evolution of early human societies.

This finding reinforces the idea that modern humans already occupied this geographical corridor between 65,000 and 68,000 years ago, supporting the so-called “long chronology” of their arrival in Australia. Furthermore, the Liang Metanduno site is not an isolated case: evidence shows continuous artistic production for approximately 35,000 years, until around 20,000 years ago. This prolonged creative activity points to the existence of a stable artistic tradition in Sulawesi, solidifying the region as one of the major Paleolithic cultural centers in Southeast Asia.