Hand Painting Made Almost 68,000 Years Ago Believed to Be Oldest Cave Art Ever Found

Researchers have discovered the stencilled print on the larger island of Sulawesi, according to new reports by the British press. 

Scientists believe the painting, which is located inside the Liang Metanduno limestone cave on Muna, an island off of Sulawesi, dates back to at least 67,800 years ago.

The piece displays a reddish hand that was reworked to illustrate a claw image, researchers said, per the BBC.

Archeologists also believe the art was created by Indigenous Australians, The Guardian reported.

This is due to the pointed shape of the finer tips, which suggests that the work was the outline of a human hand, NBC News reported.

Researchers say the original artist would have poured pigment onto a hand before pressing it against the rock, per the outlet.

“There’s a lot of rock art out there, but it’s really difficult to date,” Prof Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, told The Guardian. “When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world. It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”

Researchers were able to predict the age of the painting by examining the mineral crusts that had developed on top of the piece, according to NBC News.

Adam Brumm, a co-author of the study which was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, per NBC News, said the finding “is pretty extraordinary, because usually rock art is very difficult to date, and it doesn’t date back to anywhere near that old.”

The painting of the hand is over 15,000 years older than another cave painting on Sulawesi that researchers found in 2024, the outlet reported.

The younger painting, believed to be around 51,200 years old, reportedly portrays three human-like figures with a pig.

“I thought we were doing pretty well then, but this one image just completely blew that other one away,” Brumm told NBC News. “It really just shows how long people have been making rock art in that part of the world.”

“It’s a very long time,” he added.

The previous record holder for the oldest cave art in the world was Spain’s red hand stencil in Maltravieso cave in Western Spain, which is 66,700 years old, according to the BBC.