The oldest known images on cave walls and stone fragments are forcing a rewrite of who first made art and how sophisticated those early pictures really were. Far from crude doodles, these works show complex scenes, deliberate use of color and abstraction, and in some cases they were created long before Homo sapiens arrived in the regions where they appear. As researchers push the timeline of painting and drawing deeper into the past, the story that emerges is of multiple human species capable of advanced visual thinking.
What I see in this new evidence is not a single “big bang” of creativity, but a long, intertwined history of mark making that predates our own species and stretches across continents. From Neanderthal hand stencils in Europe to narrative hunting scenes in Indonesia and a tiny “hashtag” etched in South Africa, the world’s earliest surviving images look less like the first steps of art and more like the remnants of a visual culture that was already mature.
Redating the origins of cave painting
For more than a century, the standard story placed the birth of painting in the caves of western Europe, with Homo sapiens as the sole protagonists. That narrative is now collapsing under the weight of new dating techniques that reach far beyond the limits of radiocarbon, revealing pigments and engravings that are tens of thousands of years older than once thought. When I look at the latest age estimates, what stands out is not just how old these works are, but how quickly the supposed boundary between “modern” and “archaic” minds disappears.
Researchers working with uranium series methods have shown that some of the oldest specimens of parietal art, including simple red markings and abstract shapes, are at least 51,200 years old, pushing cave painting deep into the late Pleistocene and well into the period archaeologists classify as the oldest specimens of this kind. This redating effort has not only extended the timeline, it has also opened the door to reexamining who was capable of making such images and how widespread those abilities were.
Neanderthals step into the frame
One of the most disruptive findings is that some of the earliest known cave paintings in Europe were made by Neanderthals, not by Homo sapiens. In work reported in Feb, scientists used uranium-thorium dating on calcite crusts that had formed over red lines, dots, and hand stencils in Spanish caves, and the results showed that these images predated the arrival of our species in the region. That means the authors of these works were Neanderthals, a conclusion that overturns the long-held assumption that symbolic painting was previously believed to be solely the province of Homo sapiens.
The same study also examined decorated marine shells, again finding ages that place them firmly within Neanderthal occupation layers, which indicates that these hominins collected, modified, and likely wore or displayed objects for symbolic purposes. The painted walls and shells described in this analysis show that Neanderthals were not simply copying behaviors from Homo sapiens, but had their own traditions of color use and abstract marking. Taken together, these findings force me to see Neanderthals not as dim cousins, but as artists in their own right.
Indonesia’s narrative scenes rewrite the map
If Europe no longer holds a monopoly on early cave art, Indonesia is now one of the strongest contenders for the birthplace of complex pictorial storytelling. On the island of Sulawesi, researchers have identified a hunting scene that is not just old, but compositionally sophisticated, with multiple figures interacting in a shared narrative space. When I compare this to later art, the continuity is striking: there are recognizable animals, stylized human or human-like figures, and a clear sense that the painter wanted to depict a story rather than a single isolated form.
Using laser-ablation U-series imaging, a team re-dated the calcite overlying these images and found that the narrative cave art in Indonesia was in place by about 51,200 years ago, making it one of the earliest known examples of composed scenes anywhere in the world, as detailed in the study that begins with the word Here in this research. Another analysis of the same Sulawesi site notes that the minimum age could be a floor rather than a ceiling, with researcher Aubert explaining that the paintings may turn out to be older than the current estimate and could date back to around 60,000 years ago, a claim that underscores how advanced the visual culture of people in this region already was, as reported in a piece that quotes Aubert in this account.
From simple marks to full stories
What makes the Sulawesi paintings so important is not just their age, but their narrative structure. Instead of a single animal or handprint, the panel shows humans and a pig arranged in a way that clearly suggests interaction, with figures that appear to be hunting or confronting the animal. That kind of composed scene requires the artist to imagine a sequence of events and compress it into a single image, a cognitive leap that goes far beyond tracing a hand or daubing a dot of pigment on stone.
Researchers who examined the Sulawesi panel argue that it shows humans at the time had the capacity to think in abstract terms, to represent relationships and actions rather than just static forms, and that this ability appears outside Europe far earlier than once assumed. A report on the world’s oldest cave art found showing humans and pig notes that until about a decade ago, many specialists believed the kind of figurative storytelling we know today began in Europe, but the Indonesian scene, highlighted by BRIN and Google Arts and Culture, shows that people in Sulawesi were already capable of telling a story in paint. For me, that suggests that narrative thinking in images may be a deep, shared inheritance rather than a late European innovation.
Reframing Paleolithic art as a global phenomenon
To understand how these discoveries fit into the broader human story, it helps to step back and look at the Paleolithic as a whole. The Paleolithic Period, also known as the Old Stone Age, spans hundreds of thousands of years and includes everything from simple stone tools to elaborate cave sanctuaries. In educational overviews of cave painting history, the Paleolithic is often illustrated with a thatched hut in Italy and other reconstructions that show how early people lived, hunted, and gathered, but the art itself is increasingly recognized as central to that picture rather than a decorative afterthought.
Guides that introduce Cave Paintings History explain that the oldest known cave paintings, including a red disk in Spain that was likely made by Neanderthals, belong to this Paleolithic world and that the question “What Is the Paleolithic Period?” is inseparable from the question of when symbolic behavior began, as outlined in a survey of Cave Paintings History. When I connect these dots, I see a global phenomenon: from Italy to Indonesia, from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, Paleolithic people were experimenting with color, line, and form in ways that look remarkably consistent across vast distances and long stretches of time.
What counts as “figurative” in the deep past
One reason early images can look surprisingly advanced is that our modern categories for art already existed in embryonic form tens of thousands of years ago. Art historians today often divide works into figurative, representational, and abstract, and those distinctions map surprisingly well onto Paleolithic walls. When I look at the oldest panels, I see clear examples of figurative art, where animals and human-like figures are recognizable, alongside more ambiguous signs and shapes that may have carried symbolic meaning now lost to us.
Modern definitions describe how painting and sculpture can be divided into figurative, representational, and abstract categories, even though the boundaries between them are not always sharp, a framework laid out in discussions of Painting and related forms. Archaeologists apply similar thinking to Upper Paleolithic art, which they split into figurative works that clearly depict animals or humans and non-figurative marks such as dots, lines, and geometric patterns, as summarized in entries on the Upper Paleolithic. The fact that both kinds of imagery appear very early suggests that Paleolithic artists were already comfortable moving between representation and abstraction, a hallmark of sophisticated visual thinking.
The “stone hashtag” and the birth of drawing
Not all early images are grand murals on cave walls; some of the most revealing are tiny, portable objects that show how people experimented with line and pattern. In a cave in South Africa, archaeologists found a small piece of silcrete stone bearing a cross-hatched pattern that looks uncannily like a modern hashtag, a set of deliberate red lines that intersect to form a grid. When I consider this object, I see less a doodle and more a deliberate exercise in controlled mark making, the kind of thing someone might do while testing a tool or exploring a motif.
Researchers describe this piece as the earliest human drawing, dating back to the Stone Age, and emphasize that the cross-hatched motif was intentionally drawn onto the silcrete stone using a chunk of ochre, a finding detailed in an account of the earliest human drawing in South Africa. This “stone hashtag” shows that by the time people were painting complex scenes on cave walls, they already had a long tradition of experimenting with abstract designs on smaller surfaces, suggesting that drawing as a practice may be even older than the surviving murals imply.
Upper Paleolithic art and the first global style
By the time we reach the Upper Paleolithic, roughly the last 40,000 years of the Paleolithic Period, the archaeological record is full of images that would not look out of place in a modern art textbook. There are lifelike bison and horses, stylized human figures, and intricate patterns that repeat across sites separated by hundreds of kilometers. When I compare these works to the older Neanderthal and Sulawesi paintings, what stands out is continuity rather than rupture: the same fascination with animals, the same play between solid forms and empty space, the same urge to tell stories in pictures.
Educational resources on Paleolithic and Neolithic art note that the art of the Upper Paleolithic represents the oldest form of prehistoric art in a fully developed sense, with figurative art present in Europe as early as 40,000 years ago and non-figurative art, such as dots and abstract shapes, at least as old, as summarized in a teaching guide that highlights the art of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. When I see this, I am struck by how quickly a recognizable “global style” of Paleolithic art seems to emerge, one that links European caves, African rock shelters, and Asian sites through shared themes and techniques.
Color, innovation, and the long arc of art history
One thread that runs through these early works is a sophisticated understanding of color and material. Paleolithic artists were not just smearing whatever pigment they could find; they selected ochres, charcoals, and other minerals for specific effects, sometimes grinding and mixing them to achieve different hues and textures. That sensitivity to color connects them to much later artists who also used pigment to rethink how images could look and feel, suggesting a long arc of experimentation that stretches from cave walls to modern galleries.
Curators who examine the history of painting note that, although the assembled artists in certain exhibitions worked at different times and in different places, they all show a radically new understanding of pigment and color that changed the history of art forever, a point made in the description of the show titled Although the. When I place Paleolithic painters in that lineage, their use of red ochre on stone looks less like a primitive beginning and more like an early chapter in a continuous story of color innovation, one that later artists would revisit with new tools but similar ambitions.
Why the world’s first paintings look so advanced
Taken together, the Neanderthal hand stencils, the Sulawesi hunting scenes, the South African “hashtag,” and the Upper Paleolithic galleries show that the earliest surviving images are not tentative first steps, but the products of minds already fluent in abstraction, narrative, and design. The fact that some of these works predate Homo sapiens in Europe, and that others appear far from the traditional European heartland of cave art, suggests that visual creativity was a shared capacity among different human groups rather than a late, localized breakthrough. When I look at these walls and stones, I see not the dawn of art, but the visible tip of a much deeper iceberg of lost images and ideas.
Archaeologists now define cave paintings as a type of parietal art that ranges from simple hand stencils to complex figurative scenes, and they recognize that the oldest examples, at least 51,200 years old, already display a range of techniques and subjects that would take modern artists years to master, as outlined in overviews of cave painting. That is why the world’s earliest known paintings look so advanced: by the time pigment met stone in ways that could survive for tens of millennia, humans and their close relatives had already been thinking in images for a very long time.
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