Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws

A nearly 68,000-year-old hand stencil found on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, may be the oldest rock art ever discovered – and rather than a simple handprint, it appears to have been touched up by the artist, possibly to make the fingers look claw-like.

In recent decades it has become apparent that Sulawesi is a key location in the human story – home to numerous species of hominins from as long ago as 1.4 million years when an early human species, likely Homo erectus, made the first known sea voyages.

In 2024, Maxime Aubert at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia, and his colleagues reported that they had found the world’s oldest known “representational” art on the island – a pig depicted alongside human-like figures, that was at least 51,200 years old. Now, his team have announced the discovery of a further 44 rock art sites in south-eastern Sulawesi, and dated one partial hand stencil at a site called Liang Metanduno, on Muna Island, east Sulawesi, to 67,800 years ago.

Previously, the world’s oldest known rock art was a hand stencil at a Neanderthal site in northern Spain, dated to a minimum age of 66,700 years old – 1100 years younger than the new Sulawesi site.

The Sulawesi stencil shows signs of modification, says Aubert, as the tip of one finger appears to have been artificially narrowed. This was done either through the application of extra pigment or by moving the hand during pigment application, which is a type of hand stencil art so far known only in Sulawesi.

“It’s more than just a stencil of a hand,” says Aubert. “They are retouching it. We don’t know if they’re doing this by retouching it with a paintbrush or maybe if you spray it, and then as you do it, you move your hand, you can have the same effect.”

He says no one knows why they are using this method, “but it seems to me they want to make it look more like it’s an animal hand, possibly with claws.”

Aubert says it is impossible to know what species made the hand stencil, but based on the extra artistic intention of narrowing the fingers, it was most likely a modern human, implying that these people were close ancestors of the first humans to reach Australia.

There is evidence from a site called Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land, Australia, that Homo sapiens reached the continent at least 60,000 years ago. Evidence is also mounting that Sulawesi is one of the most important and earliest stepping stones between South-East Asia to New Guinea and onto the Australian continent.

“The implications of these discoveries go beyond just the history of the art,” says Aubert. “The people who made that art are probably the ancestors of the first Australians and now we know their ancestors were making rock art in Sulawesi at least 68,000 years ago.”

Team member Adam Brumm, also at Griffith University, says the Spanish Neanderthal hand stencil and the Sulawesi rock art were made essentially in the same way – someone spraying ochre over their hand.

“But then the modern human did something different,” says Brumm. “They deliberately altered the outlined fingers of the stencil to artificially narrow the digits and make the tips more ‘pointy’, thus transforming this human hand mark into something else, perhaps a representation of an animal claw.

“This indicates a playfulness on the part of the modern human artist; altering an otherwise ‘ordinary’ hand stencil in this manner is a sign of creative imagination and abstract thinking that is not evident in the human hand mark left behind by the Neanderthal.”

Martin Porr at the University of Western Australia in Perth says the new find is the world’s oldest known rock art that can be attributed to our species. “I agree that the dates for the stencils are, in fact, in agreement with other current dates for the earliest presence of Homo sapiens in the region, both in Australia as well as mainland Asia and South-East Asia,” says Porr. However, he thinks much more work is needed before it can be confidently concluded which routes humans took to reach Australia.

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