Indonesia and the surrounding region is known for some of the world’s most ancient archaeological finds.
Archaeologists have discovered that handprints stencilled on limestone caves on the Indonesian island of Muna could be up to 67,800 years old, making them the oldest known paintings in the world. The tan-coloured drawings, analysed by Indonesian and Australian researchers, were created by blowing pigment over hands pressed against the cave walls, leaving an outline.
According to the Jakarta Post, archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) has been searching for hand stencils in the Muna island region, in Sulawesi province, since 2015. Adhi found the hand stencils, which have now been dated, beneath more recent paintings in the cave depicting a person riding a horse alongside a chicken.
At first, Adhi said it was difficult to convince his co-researchers that the stencils were hands as he believed, but he “finally found some spots that looked like human fingers”. Some of the fingertips were also 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, a specialist in archaeological science at Griffith University in Australia, who helped lead the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them appear pointed,” Aubert added.
Aubert’s co-author, Adam Brumm, also an archaeologist at Griffith University, said it seemed the people who painted the hands may have been attempting to depict something else.
“It was almost as if they were deliberately trying to transform this image of a human hand into something else – an animal claw perhaps,” said Brumm.
“Clearly, they had some deeper cultural meaning, but we don’t know what that was. I suspect it was something to do with these ancient peoples’ complex symbolic relationship with the animal world,” he said.
The researchers established the minimum age of the image by analysing small amounts of uranium in mineral layers that gradually formed atop the pigment. After taking five-millimetre samples of tiny clusters of calcite that had formed on the limestone cave walls, the researchers then zapped the rock layers with a laser to measure how the uranium decayed over time, compared with a more stable radioactive element called thorium.
This “very precise” technique provided the scientists with a clear minimum age for the painting, Aubert said. The team also determined that the Muna caves had been used for rock art repeatedly over a long period. Some of the ancient art was even painted over up to 35,000 years later, Aubert added.
The new discovery is more than 15,000 years older than the previous art found in the Sulawesi region by the same team in 2024. The region around Indonesia is known for some of the world’s oldest archaeological finds, alongside neighbouring East Timor and Australia.
Adhi said the cave art provides fresh evidence supporting the theory that there was early human migration through Sulawesi.
“It also shows that our ancestors were not only great sailors,” Adhi said, according to the Jakarta Post, “but also artists.”
Aboriginal people living in Australia have one of the oldest continuous cultures on earth, as documented by archaeological evidence dating back at least 60,000 years. At Murujuga in north-western Australia, an estimated one million petroglyphs ancient images in caves, including rock carvings, potentially dating back as far as 50,000 years were recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Source: Lynda Rowlands and News Agencies- Al Jazeera
Photo Source: Maxime Aubert- Al Jazeera
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