A hand pressed against a cave wall more than 67,800 years ago has just been confirmed as the oldest cave painting in history. Discovered in the karst caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia, this negative hand stencil pushes back the origins of human artistic expression by at least 15,000 years, rewriting everything we thought we knew about the birth of art.
The study was published on January 21 in the journal Nature, co-authored by Indonesian archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana and Canadian archaeologist Maxime Aubert, whose laboratory specializes in uranium-thorium dating. What they found on the limestone walls of Sulawesi is not just a record-breaker. It is a window into the mind of our earliest ancestors, at a moment when humanity was only just beginning to cross into the unknown.
The oldest cave painting rewrites the history of prehistoric art
The technique behind this ancient image is disarmingly simple. A hand was pressed flat against the rock surface, and pigment was blown or applied around it, leaving a hollow silhouette — what archaeologists call a negative hand stencil or hand pochoir. The result has survived for over 67,800 years beneath a thin layer of calcite that slowly formed over the surface of the rock.
That calcite layer is exactly what allowed Maxime Aubert and his team to date the image. Uranium-thorium dating measures the radioactive decay of uranium into thorium within mineral deposits, providing a precise age for when the calcite formed on top of the painting. And because the calcite postdates the artwork, the figure obtained is a minimum age. The actual painting could be even older.
years: the minimum age of the oldest cave painting ever recorded
A superimposition spanning 60,000 years
What makes this discovery particularly striking is the layering visible on the cave wall. The negative hand is the oldest element, but on top of it — painted thousands of years later — are the silhouette of a bird and the silhouette of a rider. The most recent of these overlapping images is separated from the hand stencil by roughly 60,000 years. The same wall served as a canvas across an almost incomprehensible stretch of time.
Sulawesi dethroned Europe as the cradle of parietal art
Before this discovery, the title of oldest known drawing belonged to a ladder-shaped motif found in the Cueva de El Castillo, Spain, dated to approximately 64,000 years ago. But that image was attributed to Homo neanderthalensis, who occupied the Iberian Peninsula at the time. The Sulawesi hand stencil, by contrast, is unambiguously the work of Homo sapiens, making it the oldest known example of figurative or symbolic art created by our own species. The gap between the two is now at least 3,800 years, and potentially far more.
Sulawesi, a cradle of human artistic expression for tens of thousands of years
This is not the first time Sulawesi's karst caves have made headlines. In 2019, the same research team announced the discovery of a hunting scene depicting bovids alongside therianthropes — part-human, part-animal figures — dated to 44,000 years ago. Then, in 2024, they presented paintings of human figures interacting with a pig, dated to 51,200 years ago, which at the time was recognized as the oldest known narrative scene in prehistoric art.
The new hand stencil now sits above all of these. Together, these discoveries establish Sulawesi as the site of one of the richest and most enduring artistic traditions in human prehistory. The caves appear to have functioned as sacred spaces for tens of thousands of years, used and reused across generations that had no way of knowing what came before them — yet returned to the same walls anyway.
The uranium-thorium dating technique, used by Maxime Aubert’s laboratory, measures radioactive decay within calcite deposits that form over rock art. It provides a minimum age — meaning the paintings could be older than the date obtained.
A discovery that reshapes our understanding of human migration
Beyond art history, the 67,800-year-old hand stencil carries significant implications for the study of human migration. For Homo sapiens to have been painting on cave walls in Sulawesi at that date, they must have already crossed open water from mainland Southeast Asia and established a presence on the island. This is consistent with archaeological evidence from northern Australia, where traces of human occupation date back more than 65,000 years.
Two routes, one destination
Researchers studying the peopling of Sahul — the ancient landmass that once united present-day Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania — have identified two probable migration routes. The southern route passed through Java, while the northern route ran through Borneo, Sulawesi, and western Papua. Either way, migrants would have faced open-water crossings of 20 to 30 kilometers at the narrowest points, with a final stretch of 90 to 100 kilometers to reach Australia or New Guinea.
Sea levels at the time were more than 100 meters lower than today, which exposed large areas of continental shelf and reduced the distances involved. But the crossings still required deliberate seafaring, not accidental drift. The presence of complex symbolic behavior — painting — in Sulawesi at this period strongly suggests these were cognitively modern humans, fully capable of planning, abstraction, and cultural transmission.
A recent paleogenetic study on the peopling of Sahul places the founding migration at around 60,000 years ago, which appears to align with the broader picture. And a frontal bone recovered in Laos places Homo sapiens at the southeastern tip of Eurasia as far back as 68,000 years ago, pointing to an early dispersal along the southern coast of Asia well before any of these cave walls were ever touched.
Ongoing research in Sulawesi's caves
Excavations of the cave floors are continuing, and researchers are working to better understand the populations who left these traces. The identity of these early artists — their social structures, their beliefs, the full extent of their symbolic world — remains largely unknown. What the paintings do confirm is that the human impulse to mark a surface, to leave a trace of presence, is far older than Europe's famous decorated caves ever suggested.
Just as scientists study the long-term effects of time on organic matter — such as what research has revealed about collagen's role in skin aging — archaeologists now examine how pigments and minerals have preserved human creativity across geological time. The hand in Sulawesi is, in its own way, a testament to the same enduring question: what does it mean to leave a mark that lasts? And it turns out, Homo sapiens was asking that question at least 67,800 years ago.
