Two hand stencils pressed onto the wall of a limestone cave on a small Indonesian island are now the oldest known examples of rock art anywhere in the world. Uranium-series dating of mineral deposits covering the stencils in Liang Metanduno, a cave on Muna Island in Southeast Sulawesi, returned a minimum age of 67,800 years. That figure edges past the previous benchmark of roughly 64,800 years held by a hand stencil in Spain’s Maltravieso cave, shifting the geographic center of the oldest symbolic behavior debate from Europe to island Southeast Asia.
Why the Muna Island stencils reset the oldest-art debate
The dating result does more than add a few thousand years to the record. It places deliberate image-making deep inside Wallacea, the chain of islands between mainland Southeast Asia and Australia, at a time when modern humans were still rare or absent in western Europe. If the stencils are at least 67,800 years old, the people who made them were already living east of the biogeographic boundary known as Wallace’s Line, well along a dispersal route that eventually reached Australia. The finding forces a reconsideration of where and when symbolic traditions first took hold among early human populations.
The previous record holder, a red hand stencil inside Maltravieso cave in western Spain, was dated by uranium-thorium analysis of carbonate crusts overlying the painted surface. That study, published in Science, attributed the art to Neanderthals on the grounds that modern humans had not yet reached Iberia at the time. The new Sulawesi result does not directly challenge the Neanderthal attribution for Maltravieso, but it does establish that Homo sapiens populations in Southeast Asia were producing stencil art at comparable or earlier dates, complicating any narrative that treats European caves as the cradle of artistic expression.
In broader terms, the Muna Island discovery reinforces the idea that symbolic behavior emerged in multiple regions rather than radiating from a single cultural heartland. Hand stencils are among the simplest forms of image-making, yet they require planning, cooperation, and an understanding of how to manipulate pigment. Seeing the same basic motif appear in caves separated by thousands of kilometers and tens of millennia suggests that marking walls with human hands was a recurring solution to a shared desire to leave a trace.
How uranium-series dating anchored the 67,800-year minimum
Researchers applied uranium-series dating to mineral deposits that had formed on top of the two hand-stencil motifs inside Liang Metanduno. Because the mineral layer sits over the pigment, the age of that layer provides a minimum, meaning the art itself could be older still. The technique measures the ratio of uranium to thorium isotopes trapped in calcium carbonate as it crystallizes, and it has become the standard method for dating cave art that cannot be radiocarbon-tested directly.
This is not the first time Sulawesi caves have rewritten the timeline. A 2014 study in Nature applied the same uranium-series approach to tiny speleothem growths associated with hand stencils and animal depictions elsewhere on the island. That work established ages exceeding 40,000 years for Sulawesi rock art and was the first clear evidence that artistic traditions in Southeast Asia were as old as anything in Ice Age Europe. The new result from Liang Metanduno extends the same analytical logic by nearly 28,000 years, using mineral deposits in a cave on a neighboring island to push the minimum age to almost 68,000 years.
One practical consequence of the minimum-age framing is that the true age of the stencils could be substantially older. Uranium-series dating tells researchers when the overlying crust began to form, not when the pigment was applied. Any gap between the act of stenciling and the onset of mineral growth adds unrecorded time. The 67,800-year figure is a floor, not a ceiling, and the real date of the artwork could lie thousands of years deeper in the past.
Even with that caveat, the method has important strengths. Carbonate crusts can be sampled without removing large portions of the painting itself, preserving the images while still yielding numerical ages. Because uranium decays at a known rate, the isotope ratios provide an internal check on contamination and open-system behavior. When multiple samples from different parts of a motif converge on similar ages, the case for a robust minimum date becomes stronger.
Open questions about Sulawesi’s earliest artists
Several issues remain unresolved. The published result covers two stencil motifs in a single cave chamber. If future sampling from the same site or nearby caves on Muna Island returns ages clustering above 70,000 years, the data would suggest that symbolic marking in Wallacea preceded the main dispersal wave of modern humans into the region rather than coinciding with it. That distinction matters because it would imply either an earlier, unrecorded migration or a longer period of cultural development on the islands than current models assume.
The identity of the artists is another gap. In Iberia, the Science paper attributed Maltravieso’s stencil to Neanderthals based on the absence of Homo sapiens in the region at the time. No equivalent species-level claim has been made for Liang Metanduno, where modern humans are the presumed makers, but the fossil record for Wallacea in this period is thin. Without skeletal remains or DNA evidence directly associated with the art, the link between the stencils and a specific hominin population rests on inference rather than proof.
There are also questions about how representative Liang Metanduno is of wider practices in Wallacea. Hand stencils and figurative paintings are known from other Sulawesi sites, but most are significantly younger. If Muna Island turns out to preserve a particularly early phase of symbolic behavior, researchers will want to understand what environmental, social, or demographic factors made this small island a focal point for such activity. Alternatively, the apparent uniqueness of the site may reflect a sampling bias, with equally old art elsewhere still waiting to be discovered under unexamined crusts.
Error margins and sampling details for the 67,800-year minimum age have not been fully reproduced beyond the study’s abstract summary. Full analytical tables, including the exact number of samples taken and the precise locations of each sample within the cave, would allow independent researchers to evaluate how tightly the age estimate is constrained. Publication of those data in supplementary materials or future follow-up studies will be the next thing to watch for anyone tracking whether the result holds up under scrutiny.
Another open line of inquiry concerns the cultural context of the stencils themselves. Hand negatives can be interpreted in many ways: as signatures, as markers of group presence, as elements in initiation rituals, or as components of more complex compositions that have not survived. The Liang Metanduno motifs appear in isolation on the reported panels, but the cave may once have hosted additional imagery now lost to erosion, mineral buildup, or human disturbance. Detailed recording of the site layout, including any associated engravings, pigment traces, or archaeological deposits on the cave floor, will be essential for reconstructing how the space was used.
For now, a hand pressed against a cave wall on Muna Island stands as the oldest known trace of our species marking the world with enduring symbols. The stencils fix a moment when someone mixed pigment, placed a palm on cool limestone, and blew or spat color to leave a negative imprint that would outlast ice ages and rising seas. As more caves in Wallacea and beyond are systematically surveyed and dated, that solitary gesture may come to be seen not as an outlier, but as one of many early experiments in making meaning visible on stone.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
