Oldest cave paintings may rewrite origins of human creativity

A stencil outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world’s oldest known cave painting, researchers say.

It shows the red outline of a hand with its fingers reworked into a claw-like pattern, suggesting an early leap of symbolic imagination, the researchers said.

The painting dates to at least 67,800 years ago, predating previously documented Spanish hand-painted templates by about 1,100 years.

The discovery also strengthens the argument that our species – Homo sapiens – had reached the wider Australian-New Guinea continent (called Sahul) some 15,000 years earlier than some researchers thought.

A series of discoveries in Sulawesi over the past decade has overturned the old belief that our species’ artistic and abstract thinking exploded in Ice Age Europe and spread from there.

Cave art is seen as a key sign of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways – the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science.

Early paintings and prints show people not only responding to the world, but also representing it, sharing stories and identities in ways that no other species did.

Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University in Australia, co-leader of the project, told BBC News that the latest findings, Published in Naturecomplementing the emerging view that European humanity has not awakened. Rather, creativity is innate to us humans, with evidence dating back to Africa, where we evolved.

“We were taught this when I was in college in the mid-to-late 1990s – that the explosion of human creativity occurred in a small part of Europe. But now we are seeing features of modern human behavior, including Indonesian narrative art, that make the Eurocentric argument difficult to sustain.”

Spain’s oldest cave art is the Red Hand Template at the Maltravieso Cave in western Spain, which is at least 66,700 years old – although this is disputed, with some experts believing it’s not that old.

In 2014, handmade stencils and animal figurines from at least 40,000 years ago were discovered in Sulawesi, followed by hunting scenes from at least 44,000 years ago, and then narrative pig and human paintings from at least 51,200 years ago. Griffith University professor Maxime Aubert said each step pushed complex image-making further back in time.

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

The latest discovery comes from a limestone cave called Liang Metanduno on Muna Island, a small island in southeast Sulawesi. It was spray-painted: An ancient graffiti artist pressed their hands flat against the cave wall and blew or spit paint around it, so that when they removed their hands, a negative outline was left on the rock.

There was a broken handmade template covered with a thin crust of minerals that was analyzed and found to have a minimum age of 67,800 years, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art in the world.

Most importantly, the researchers say, the artist did more than just spray paint around his hands pressed against the wall.

After the initial templates were made, the outline of the fingers was carefully altered—narrowing and elongating them to look more like claws; this creative transformation, according to Bloom, was “something we had to do.”

He points out that there is no evidence that our sister species, the Neanderthals, conducted such experiments in cave paintings in Spain from around 64,000 years ago. Even this is hotly debated, as some researchers question the dating method.

Prior to this latest discovery on Muna Island, all Sulawesi paintings came from the Maros Pangkep karst in the southwest of the island. The fact that this much older template appears on the other side of Sulawesi, on a separate satellite island, suggests that creating images on cave walls was not a local experiment but was deeply embedded in the culture that pervaded the region.

Years of fieldwork by Indonesian colleagues have uncovered “hundreds of new rock art sites” in remote areas, including caves that have been reused for tens of thousands of years, Bloom said. Other younger paintings on the same panel by Liang Metanduno – some dating as late as about 20,000 years ago – suggest that the cave was the focus of artistic activity for at least 35,000 years.

As Sulawesi lies on the northern passage between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, these dates have direct implications for assessing when Australia’s Aboriginal ancestors 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 Australian-New Guinea continent of Sahul around 50,000 years ago.

But Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) said there was strong evidence that Homo sapiens settled in Sulawesi at least 67,800 years ago and created complex symbolic art, making the controversial archaeological evidence of humans in northern Australia from about 65,000 years ago more likely to be correct.

“The people who created these paintings in Sulawesi were likely part of a wider population that later spread to the region and eventually reached Australia.”

Many archaeologists have argued that there was a “big explosion” of ideas in Europe, since cave paintings, carvings, ornaments and new stone tools all appear to have appeared together about 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens arrived in France and Spain.

The spectacular Ice Age cave art at places like Altamira and El Castillo encourages the idea that symbolism and art were transformed almost overnight in Ice Age Europe. Since then, carved ochres, beads and abstract markings from South African sites such as the roughly 70,000-100,000-year-old Blombos Cave suggest that symbolic behavior was well established in Africa long ago.

Alongside Sulawesi’s very old figurative and narrative paintings, a new consensus is emerging; Obert told BBC News that creativity has a deeper, broader story.

“This suggests that humans had this ability for a long time, at least when they left Africa – but probably before that”.