The discovery of a stencilled hand painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi has rewritten the timeline of human creativity, according to researchers. The painting, which features a red outline of a hand with elongated, claw-like fingers, has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago – making it the oldest known cave art in the world.
This finding challenges the long-held belief that the emergence of sophisticated artistic expression and symbolic thinking occurred suddenly in Ice Age Europe around 40,000 years ago. Instead, the evidence from Sulawesi suggests that the capacity for abstract, creative thought was innate to our species, Homo sapiens, and had its origins much earlier in Africa.
“When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught – the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe,” said Professor Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Australia, who co-led the research project. “But now we’re seeing traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art in Indonesia, which makes that Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain.”
The Sulawesi hand stencil was created using a spray-painting technique, where the artist pressed their hand against the cave wall and then blew or spat pigment around it, leaving a negative outline. Analysis of the thin mineral crusts that have formed over the painting indicate it is at least 67,800 years old, predating the previous record holder – a red hand stencil in Spain’s Maltravieso cave, dated to at least 66,700 years ago.
Crucially, the researchers note that the Sulawesi artist did more than simply spray pigment around a hand. They carefully altered the outlines of the fingers, narrowing and elongating them to create a more claw-like appearance – a creative transformation that Brumm describes as “a very sophisticated thing to do.”
This experimentation is not seen in the cave art produced by our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, in Spain around 64,000 years ago. The researchers argue that this suggests the capacity for symbolic, abstract thinking was unique to Homo sapiens.
The discovery of this ancient cave painting on Sulawesi also has implications for understanding the spread of modern humans across the region. The island’s location on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and the ancient landmass of Sahul, which included Australia and New Guinea, means the 67,800-year-old date provides strong evidence that Homo sapiens had reached this area much earlier than previously thought.
“It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia,” said Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s national research and innovation agency (BRIN).
The discovery in Sulawesi, combined with earlier finds of abstract art and symbolic objects in Africa dating back over 70,000 years, is shaping a new consensus that the capacity for creative expression was not a sudden “big bang” in Europe, but rather a much deeper and more widespread story of human ingenuity that stretches back to our origins in Africa.
Human evolution, it seems, has a richer and more complex creative history than we once believed.
