Oldest Rock Art: Hand Stencil in Indonesia Rewrites History

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA—According to a Science News report, Adam Brumm of Griffith University and his colleagues dated 11 cave paintings found on small islands to the southeast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and determined that a hand stencil in Metanduno Cave on Muna Island is about 67,800 years old. Brumm suggests that the person who made the stencil by placing their hand against the wall and then spraying a mouthful of paint around it was part of the population of modern humans who traveled the region in dugout canoes. This group of people is thought to have eventually reached the continent of Sahul, which once connected New Guinea and Australia, some 65,000 years ago. The stencil in Metanduno Cave was then slowly encrusted with minerals and surrounded with later charcoal and ocher drawings. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature. For more on the cave art of Sulawesi, go to "Shock of the Old."