A team of archeologists working in the Maros karst caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia have found paintings that appear to be at least 40,000 years old. These paintings strongly resemble well known European cave art of the same time period, showing that there were common art forms in use on opposite sides of the world forty thousand years ago, implying human art is much older.
Here, using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 thousand years, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In addition, a painting of a babirusa (‘pig-deer’) made at least 35.4 thousand years ago is among the earliest dated figurative depictions worldwide, if not the earliest one. Among the implications, it can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art by aproximately 40 thousand years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world.
The paper is paywalled here, at Nature Magazine’s website. The précis is quoted above.
“Coralloid speleothems” are a particular type of stalactite, formed of layers of diatom colonies, detrital minerals and clay. Because the diatoms were water-dwelling living creatures, the Uranium series dating technique is applicable to the speleothems. By determining the age of diatom colonies that have formed on top of the paint, minimum age of the cave art can be approximated.
The Beeb has an article… Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art.