The World's Oldest Cave Art, Discovered in Indonesia, Is at Least 67,800 Years Old

Liang Metanduno cave on Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi, contains many paintings of humans, animals, and boats and served as a major art site until about 20,000 years ago. A faint handprint there was probably created by blowing an ochre-and-water mixture over an actual human hand. Uranium-series analysis of calcium-carbonate deposits on and around the print produced a minimum age of 67,800 years. That minimum age exceeds the oldest similar Indonesian rock art and a hand stencil in Spain attributed to Neanderthals. The handprint's true age may be older than the minimum, and the maker could possibly have been Neanderthal.

"Image by Ahdi Agus Okta­viana Over the cen­turies, a vari­ety of places have laid cred­i­ble claim to being the world's art cen­ter: Con­stan­tino­ple, Flo­rence, Paris, New York. But on the scale of, say, ten mil­len­nia, the hot spots become rather less rec­og­niz­able. Up until about 20,000 years ago, it seems that cre­ators and view­ers of art alike spent a good deal in one par­tic­u­lar cave: Liang Metan­duno, locat­ed on Muna Island in Indone­sia's South­east Sulawe­si province. The many paint­ings on its walls of rec­og­niz­able humans, ani­mals, and boats have brought it fame in our times as a kind of ancient art gallery. But in recent years, a much old­er piece of work has been dis­cov­ered there, one whose cre­ation occurred at least 67,800 years ago."

"The cre­ation in ques­tion is a hand­print, faint but detectable, prob­a­bly made by blow­ing a mix­ture of ochre and water over an actu­al human hand. To deter­mine its age, researchers per­formed what's called ura­ni­um-series analy­sis on the deposits of cal­ci­um car­bon­ate that had built up on and around it."

"The num­ber of 67,800 years is, of course, not exact, but it's also just a min­i­mum: in fact, the hand­print could well be much old­er. In a paper pub­lished last week in Nature, the researchers point out that its age exceeds both that of the old­est sim­i­lar rock art found else­where in Indone­sia and that of a hand sten­cil in Spain attrib­uted to Nean­derthals, "which until now rep­re­sent­ed the old­est demon­strat­ed min­i­mum-age con­straint for cave art world­wide.""

Read at Open Culture