World’s oldest art? Ancient handprints in Indonesia push human creativity back nearly 68,000 years

Archaeologists say handprints stencilled on limestone cave walls on the Indonesian island of Muna may be the oldest known paintings ever discovered, dating back as far as 67,800 years.

The tan-coloured images were created by blowing pigment over hands pressed against the cave surface, leaving behind sharp outlines that have survived tens of thousands of years. The findings were published on Wednesday following work by Indonesian and Australian researchers.

The hand stencils were uncovered beneath later cave paintings, including scenes of a human figure riding a horse alongside a chicken, suggesting the caves were reused by different generations over an enormous stretch of time.

According to The Jakarta Post, archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency has been searching for similar hand stencils in the region since 2015. At first, he struggled to convince colleagues that the faded shapes really were hands.

“I finally found some spots that looked like human fingers,” Adhi said.

Some of those fingers were deliberately altered, with tips reshaped to look pointed rather than rounded.

Maxime Aubert, an archaeological science specialist at Griffith University and a co-lead author of the study published in Nature, said the style was unique.

“The oldest hand stencil described here is distinctive because it belongs to a style found only in Sulawesi,” Aubert said. “The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them appear pointed.”

His co-author Adam Brumm suggested the artists may not have been aiming to depict hands at all.

“It was almost as if they were deliberately trying to transform this image of a human hand into something else – an animal claw perhaps,” Brumm said. “Clearly, they had some deeper cultural meaning, but we don’t know what that was.”

To date the images, researchers analysed tiny mineral layers that formed on top of the pigment, using uranium-thorium dating. By measuring how uranium decayed into thorium inside calcite deposits, the team established a minimum age for the paintings with what Aubert described as “very precise” accuracy.

The dating also revealed that the caves were used repeatedly, with some artworks painted over as much as 35,000 years later. The newly dated handprints are more than 15,000 years older than previous cave art found in Sulawesi by the same team in 2024.

The discovery strengthens evidence that early humans migrated through Sulawesi, leaving behind not just tools and bones, but symbolic art.

“It also shows that our ancestors were not only great sailors,” Adhi said, “but also artists.”

The wider region, including Indonesia, East Timor and Australia, is already known for hosting some of the world’s oldest archaeological evidence of human culture. In northwestern Australia, the vast rock art landscape of Murujuga, home to an estimated one million petroglyphs, was recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.