PHOTO credit @National Geographic

By The South Asia Times

JAKARTA -  Archaeologists have uncovered the world’s oldest known rock art in Indonesia, a hand stencil estimated to be at least 67,800 years old, providing new insights into early human cognition and migration in Southeast Asia.

The artwork was found in the Liang Metanduno cave on Muna, a tropical island off southeastern Sulawesi. Unlike the more recent depictions of birds, pigs, and warriors on the cave walls, this ancient stencil resembles a claw, hinting at imaginative and symbolic thinking by early humans, according to the National Geographic.

The discovery was made in 2015 by archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s National Agency for Research and Innovation (BRIN). Using laser-ablation uranium-series dating, Oktaviana and Australian archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University confirmed the age of the claw-like hand stencil, making it the oldest known rock art attributed to modern humans. The findings were published Wednesday in Nature.

“This hand stencil shows that early modern humans in the Indonesian archipelago during the Late Pleistocene had sophisticated cognition,” said Oktaviana. The Muna art is roughly 16,600 years older than rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves of Sulawesi, and 1,100 years older than Neanderthal hand stencils found in Spain.

Researchers also dated hand stencils from two other nearby caves, revealing ages between 44,500 and 20,400 years. These findings suggest that rock art-making persisted in Indonesia for tens of thousands of years, during periods when lower sea levels exposed the landmass of Sundaland. The discoveries may shed light on the population movements that eventually led to the first humans arriving in Australia around 65,000 years ago.

The claw-like hand stencil is not only the oldest known example of such artwork but also evidence of early humans’ ability to transform a simple hand mark into symbolic or imaginative forms. “It is the strongest evidence that our species was present in the region at that time and that they playfully transformed a human hand into something else,” said Adam Brumm, coauthor of the study and archaeologist at Griffith University.

The discovery follows earlier research in 2019, when Aubert and Oktaviana documented narrative cave paintings depicting human-animal hybrid figures hunting Sulawesi’s dwarf buffalo, showing early humans’ capacity for abstract thinking and imagination.

By illuminating the intelligence and creativity of Southeast Asia’s ancient inhabitants, the Muna hand stencils provide a remarkable window into the cognitive abilities of our distant ancestors and their role in human migration across the region.