A stencilled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world's oldest known cave painting, researchers say.
It shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers were reworked, researchers say, to create a claw-like motif which indicates an early leap in symbolic imagination.
The painting has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago – around 1,100 years before the previous record, a controversial hand stencil in Spain.
The find also strengthens the argument that our species, Homo sapiens, had reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass, known as Sahul, by around 15,000 years earlier than some researchers argue.
Over the past decade, a series of discoveries on Sulawesi has overturned the old idea that art and abstract thinking in our species burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there.
Cave art is seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways – the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science.
Professor Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Australia, who co-led the project, told BBC News that the latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, adds to the emerging view that there was no awakening for humanity in Europe. Instead, creativity was innate to our species, the evidence for which stretches back to Africa, where we evolved.
In 2014, hand stencils and animal figures dating back at least 40,000 years were found in Sulawesi, followed by a hunting scene that is at least 44,000 years old, and then a narrative pig and human painting dated to at least 51,200 years ago. Each step pushed sophisticated image making further back in time.
Because Sulawesi lies on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, the dates have direct implications for assessing when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians first arrived. The study suggests that creativity and symbolic thought were intrinsic to early humans long before they reached Europe.
