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+--- Thread: Research World’s oldest rock art found in Indonesia (primeval design) (/thread-19662.html)
World’s oldest rock art found in Indonesia (primeval design) - C C - Jan 23, 2026
https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/7702/World-s-oldest-rock-art-found-in-Indonesia?searchresult=1
INTRO: A hand stencil in an Indonesian cave was drawn at least 67,800 years ago, making it about 15,000 years older than the next oldest rock art in the world.
The new find was made on a small satellite island called Muna in southeastern Sulawesi and is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature. The partially-preserved hand stencil is surrounded by other ancient rock art made tens of thousands of years later.
Archaeologists used uranium-series dating techniques on material deposits beneath and on top of the rock art in the Liang Metanduno caves. They determined the stencil is 67,800 years old or even older.
This makes the cave painting the oldest reliably dated rock art in the world. That title previously belonged to another cave painting found in Sulawesi publicly announced in 2024 as a “picture story” dating to at least 51,200 years ago. Both cave paintings were found by the same international team of archaeologists led by researchers from Australia and Indonesia.
The Muna cave was used for making art for a mind-bendingly long period of at least 35,000 years.
“It is now evident from our new phase of research that Sulawesi was home to one of the world’s richest and most longstanding artistic cultures, one with origins in the earliest history of human occupation of the island at least 67,800 years ago,” says study co-lead Maxime Aubert from Australia’s Griffith University... (MORE - details)
RE: World’s oldest rock art found in Indonesia (primeval design) - Zinjanthropos - Jan 23, 2026
Why is a stencilled hand considered art? Is it for the same reason this is worth a couple million bucks? Any one of us probably painted something similar as a kid in art class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire
Thinking that purely by accident, somewhere someone stencilled their hand onto a rock face or similar. Nature then, has been stencilling since forever.. Fossils look like stencils. Although a bit macabre, Hiroshima victims instantly incinerated were stencilled onto the sidewalks they stood on. Nuclear artwork? Are shadows stencils?
Guess I don’t see the art like some. What constitutes art is the question. Do things or actions have to appeal to us, like a wow factor, before qualifying as art? Somehow a guy in a cave stencilling his hand, something he could have done a thousand times anywhere else, qualifies.
RE: World’s oldest rock art found in Indonesia (primeval design) - C C - Jan 24, 2026
(Jan 23, 2026 01:58 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [...] Guess I don’t see the art like some. What constitutes art is the question. Do things or actions have to appeal to us, like a wow factor, before qualifying as art? Somehow a guy in a cave stencilling his hand, something he could have done a thousand times anywhere else, qualifies.
Basically due to the age and the archeological value, of course, along with maybe an indicator of when our brains evolved to be fully capable of what they can do now. That long ago they had no conception of art, so probably some kind of ritual thing to mystically induce better hunting, or whatever.
Who knows, maybe a kid even made it -- that's certainly what one might think today, since we'd expect more from an adult. Give a chimp some ochre, charcoal, calcite, and animal fat, and even without encouragement it might choose to make a mess on a stone surface -- though it wouldn't resemble an animal or anything (just 20th-century abstract art).
Maybe graphic depictions originally started when a grown-up saw children playfully smearing mud on rock, and in pareidolia fashion thought that the random pattern or blotch resembled a known object. Sudden enlightenment about what guided mischief could achieve. After that, just need to add magical belief in the power of symbols. You could deliberately create apophenia like appearances rather waiting for nature to randomly provide them. "Oh, look, Tungor! That cloud in the sky looks like a running deer! How sacred!"