A faint hand stencil in a limestone cave on Indonesia’s Muna Island is reshaping the timeline of early human art. The image, found at Liang Metanduno cave in Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula, is easy to overlook – a worn patch showing only parts of fingers and a palm. Yet researchers now say it was created at least 67,800 years ago, making
it the oldest known example of rock art.
Rather than dating the pigment itself, scientists analyzed a thin layer of calcite that formed over the stencil. Because the mineral crust developed after the painting was made, its age provides a minimum date for the artwork beneath it. Using a laser-based technique to measure uranium and thorium levels in the calcite, the research team determined an age of about 71,600 years. Even accounting for the margin of error, the stencil remains older than 67,800 years.
The finding pushes Sulawesi’s artistic record significantly further back in time. The Muna stencil predates the well-known rock art of the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi by roughly 16,600 years and is about 1,100 years older than hand stencils in Spain attributed to Neanderthals.
The discovery adds to growing evidence that early humans in Indonesia possessed advanced cognitive abilities. Earlier research documented 51,200-year-old cave paintings depicting human figures with animal traits hunting local species, images that suggest the ability to imagine beings that do not exist. Researchers say the newly dated hand stencils from Muna indicate similar levels of symbolic and creative thought.
One stencil depicts fingers resembling an animal claw, a stylistic feature found only in Sulawesi. National Geographic Explorer Maxime Aubert said the deliberate modification suggests complex thinking and may reflect early ideas about human-animal relationships.
An independent expert noted the stencils might have been related to the practice of warding off misfortune, a ritual still observed among some Indigenous groups in Sulawesi. Together, the findings challenge long-standing Eurocentric assumptions that cognitive modernity first emerged in Western Europe.