Oldest cave painting could rewrite origins of human creativity

The outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the oldest known cave painting in the world, researchers said.

Researchers say it shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers have been reworked to create a claw-like shape, suggesting an early leap into symbolic imagination.

The painting dates back to at least 67,800 years ago, about 1,100 years earlier than the previous record, a controversial hand-stencil drawing in Spain.

The discovery also strengthens the argument that our species, Homo sapiens, reached the wider landmass between Australia and New Guinea, known as Sahol, about 15,000 years earlier than some researchers claim.

Over the past decade, a series of discoveries in Sulawesi have upended the long-held idea that art and abstract thinking in our species suddenly exploded into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there.

Cave art is seen as a major marker of the time when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways, the kind of imagination supported by language, religion, and science.

Early paintings and engravings show that people not only interacted with the world, but represented it, sharing stories and identities in a way that no other being was known to do.

Professor Adam Broom from Griffith University in Australia, who co-led the project, told BBC News that the latest discovery, Published in Nature magazineThis adds to the emerging view that there has been no awakening of humanism in Europe. Instead, creativity was innate in our species, and evidence of this goes back to Africa, where we evolved.

“When I went to university in the mid-to-late 1990s, this is what we were taught – the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe. But now we are seeing features of modern human behaviour, including narrative art in Indonesia, that make the Eurocentric argument very difficult to sustain.”

The oldest Spanish cave art is a red hand stencil in Maltravieso Cave in western Spain, dating back to at least 66,700 years ago – although this is controversial and some experts don’t think it’s that old.

In 2014, hand stencils and animal figures dating back to at least 40,000 years ago were found in Sulawesi, followed by a hunting scene at least 44,000 years old, then a narrative pig and human painting dating back to at least 51,200 years ago. Each step pushed the cutting-edge image industry back in time, according to Professor Maxime Aubert of Griffith University.

“We started with a minimum age of at least 40,000 years, at the same time as in Europe, but by getting closer to the pigment, we pushed the Sulawesi rock art back at least another 28,000 years.”

The latest discovery came from a limestone cave called Liang Metandono on Mona, a small island off southeast Sulawesi. They were spray-painted: an ancient graffiti artist placed his hand flat on a cave wall, then blew or spit an amount of pigment around it so that, when he pulled the hand away, it left a negative outline on the rock.

There is a fragmentary hand stencil covered in thin mineral flakes that, when analyzed, was found to be at least 67,800 years old, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art anywhere in the world.

More importantly, the researchers say, the artist did more than simply squirt the pigment around his hand pressed against the wall.

After the original stencil was made, the outlines of the fingers were carefully altered – narrowed and elongated to make them look more like a claw; The creative shift Broome says is “something we have to do.”

He points out that there is no evidence of that experience in any of the art produced by its sister species, the Neanderthals, in cave paintings in Spain about 64,000 years ago. Even this is highly controversial because some researchers question the dating method.

Until this recent discovery at Mona, all the paintings in Sulawesi had come from the Maros Pangkep karst in the southwest of the island. The fact that this much older stencil appeared on the other side of Sulawesi, on a separate satellite island, suggests that making images on cave walls was not a local experience, but was deeply rooted in cultures that spread across the region.

Broome says years of fieldwork by his Indonesian colleagues have uncovered “hundreds of new rock art sites” in remote areas, with some caves used repeatedly over tens of thousands of years. At Liang Metandono, other, younger paintings on the same panel – some produced as late as about 20,000 years ago – show that this single cave was a center of artistic activity spanning at least 35,000 years.

Because Sulawesi lies on the Northern Sea Route between mainland Asia and the ancient plains, the dates have direct implications for assessing when the ancestors of indigenous Australians first arrived.

For many years, the prevailing view — based largely on DNA studies and most archaeological sites — was that Homo sapiens first arrived on the ancient landmass of Australia and New Guinea, the Sahol, about 50,000 years ago.

But with compelling evidence that Homo sapiens settled in Sulawesi and made complex symbolic art at least 67,800 years ago, it raises the possibility that controversial archaeological evidence about the presence of humans in northern Australia around 65,000 years ago is valid, according to Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN).

“It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the wider population that later spread across the region and eventually arrived in Australia.”

Many archaeologists once argued in favor of the European “Big Bang” of sapiens, because cave paintings, sculptures, ornaments and new stone tools all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens arrived there.

The amazing Ice Age cave art in places like Altamira and El Castillo has encouraged the idea that symbolism and art were transformed almost overnight in Ice Age Europe. Since then, patterned ochre, beads, and abstract markings from South African sites, such as Blombos Cave, between 70,000 and 100,000 years old, have shown that symbolic behavior was already established in Africa long before.

Together with very old pictorial and narrative paintings from Sulawesi, a new consensus is being formed; Obert told BBC News that there is a deeper and more widespread story to creativity.

“What it suggests is that humans have had this ability for a very long time, at least when they left Africa – but perhaps before that.”