World’s oldest art identified in Indonesian cave

Ancient cave art found in a cave in the 1950s on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi has undergone uranium-thorium dating, revealing that the art was made 40,000 years ago.

The researchers dated 12 stencils of human hands and two images of large animals. Because they sampled the top layer of calcium carbonate, the uranium dating technique gave them a minimum age for each sample.

They found that the oldest stencil was at least 39,900 years old — 2,000 years older than the minimum age of the oldest European hand stencil. An image of a babirusa, or ‘pig-deer’, resembling an aubergine with stick-like legs jutting from each end, was estimated to be 35,400 years old — around the same age as the earliest large animal pictures in European caves.

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Story: David Cyranoski, Nature | Photo: Nature