The world's oldest drawing on a cave wall has been found
A handprint in a Sulawesi cave is 67,800 years old
Archaeologists in Indonesia have dated a fragment of a stencilled handprint on the wall of a limestone cave to make it the oldest reliably dated example of cave art known to date.
The cave in question is Liang Metanduno on the island of Muna off the coast of Sulawesi. The minimum age of the drawing is 67.8 thousand years.
Dating was obtained using the uranium-serial method: scientists analysed thin calcite deposits that naturally formed on top of the pigment (and sometimes under it). The paper in Nature reports the result: the uranium-serial date for the deposits above the stencil was 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years, which gives a lower limit on the age of the image of 67.8 thousand years.
This markedly "pushes back" the history of rock art: the new find is older than the previously published minimums for Pleistocene art of Sulawesi (in the Maros-Pangkep area) by about 16.6 thousand years, and also slightly older than the minimum for one of the Spanish hand stencils, which in discussions was associated with Neanderthals.
The motif itself is also unusual. The print is not just a classic palm outline: according to the authors' description, the tip of one of the fingers looks artificially "narrowed" - perhaps it was drawn with pigment or the hand was shifted during the application of paint. Such "narrow-fingered" stencils have so far been confidently recorded in Sulawesi, and the new result shows that this local tradition may be much older than thought.
In the same cave, the researchers found indications that the images were created in different eras. For another sample from the same panel, dates have been obtained that indicate at least two episodes of artistic activity, separated by a gap of about 35,000 years. This hints that the site may have reentered the cultural "orbit" of different generations of people over a very long period of time.
Why is this important for more than just art history?
Sulawesi and neighbouring islands lie in the Wallacea Zone, a maritime "corridor" between mainland Southeast Asia (Sunda) and the ancient Sahul Massif (Australia-New Guinea-Tasmania). The authors of the paper note: such ancient art in Sulawesi supports a scenario in which the settlement of Sahul about 65,000 years ago was associated with sea crossings and island "hopping" via the northern route.