Jakarta (VNA) - The global scientific community was stunned on January 21 by the discovery of a red hand stencil painted on a cave wall in Indonesia, dated to at least 67,800 years ago.
The finding has been identified as the oldest known rock art ever discovered, offering crucial clues about the earliest human migrations into Oceania.
The cave art dates back at least 67,800 years, according to research published in the journal Nature by a team of Indonesian and Australian archaeologists.
Study co-author Maxime Aubert of Australia's Griffith University said the team conducted a survey of caves on the island of Muna in Sulawesi province on the advice of Indonesian archeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, the study's lead author.
According to the team, there they found "handprints in negative, stencilled, probably using red ochre." The fingers of one of the hands were "retouched to become pointed like claws -- a style of painting only seen in Sulawesi."
To determine the art's age, the team took five-millimetre samples from "cave popcorn", which are small clusters of calcite that form on the walls of limestone caves. Then they zapped the layers of rock with a laser to measure how the uranium decayed over time, compared to a more stable radioactive element called thorium. This "very precise" technique gave the scientists a clear minimum age for the painting.
At 67,800 years old, the Indonesian stencil is more than a thousand years older than other hand stencils found in a Spanish cave which has been attributed to Neanderthals.
The scientists also established that the Muna caves had been used for rock art many times over a long period.
The researchers also said that the paintings were very likely created by people closely linked to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians./.
