A stenciled handprint found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the oldest known cave drawing in the world, researchers claim.
The drawing represents a red outline of a hand whose fingers were subsequently reshaped to create a claw-like motif, indicating an early leap in symbolic imagination, the researchers say.
The drawing is thought to be at least 67.800 years old, which is about 1.100 years earlier than the previous record of a controversial handprint in Spain.
This discovery further supports the thesis that our species, Homo sapiens, reached the wider landmass of Australia and New Guinea, known as Sahul, about 15.000 years earlier than some researchers claim.
Over the past decade, a series of discoveries in Sulawesi have overturned the old idea that art and abstract thinking in our species suddenly appeared in Europe during the Ice Age and spread from there.
Cave art is considered a key indicator of the moment when humans began to think truly abstractly and symbolically, the kind of imagination that underlies language, religion, and science.
Early drawings and engravings show that humans not only responded to the world around them, but also represented it, sharing stories and identities in a way no other species is known to have done.
The latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, adds to the growing understanding that this way of thinking in humans did not first appear in Europe, Professor Adam Bram of Griffiths University in Australia, one of the leaders of the research, tells BBC News.
Instead, creativity was innate to our species, and the evidence for this goes back to Africa, where we evolved.
"That's what we were taught when I went to college in the mid-to-late 1990s - that the creative explosion in humans happened in a small part of Europe."
"But now we see characteristics of modern human behavior, including narrative art in Indonesia, that make this Eurocentric view very difficult to sustain," he says.
The oldest Spanish cave art is a red stencil handprint in the Maltravies cave in western Spain, thought to be at least 66.700 years old, although the dating is disputed and some experts believe it is not that old.
On the island of Sulawesi, stenciled handprints and animal figures at least 40.000 years old were found in 2014, followed by a hunting scene at least 44.000 years old, and later a narrative drawing of a pig and people believed to be at least 51.200 years old.
Each of these discoveries pushed the boundaries of refined pictorial expression deeper into the past, says Professor Maxim Ober of Griffiths University.
"We started with an age assumption of at least about 40.000 years, the same as in Europe, but as we got closer to the pigment, we pushed the age of the cave art on Sulawesi back at least another 28.000 years."
The latest discovery is located in the Liang Metandun limestone cave on Muni, a small island southeast of Sulawesi.
The drawing was made using the pigment spraying technique.
The ancient graffiti artist placed his hand on a cave rock and then blew or spat pigment around it from his mouth, leaving a handprint on the rock when he removed it.
One fragmentary stencil handprint is covered in thin layers of minerals that have been analyzed to be at least 67.800 years old, making it the oldest reliably dated cave drawing in the world.
What's crucial is that the artist didn't just scatter pigment around a hand resting on the cave rock, the researchers say.
The original contours of the hand were later carefully altered – the fingers were narrowed and elongated to resemble a claw, a creative transformation that Bram considers "something very human".
He notes that there is no evidence of this kind of experimentation in the art of our related species, the Neanderthals, in their cave drawings in Spain from about 64.000 years ago.
Even that age is the subject of heated debate, as some researchers question the dating method used.
Until this latest discovery on Muni Island, all known cave paintings on Sulawesi were found in the Maros Pangkep karst area, in the southwest of the island.
The fact that this much older stencil print appears on the opposite side of Sulawesi, on a separate small island, indicates that cave wall painting was not a local experiment, but a practice that was deeply rooted in the cultures that spread through the area.
Bram says that over the years of fieldwork, his Indonesian colleagues have discovered "hundreds of new rock art sites" in remote areas, with some caves being used repeatedly over tens of thousands of years.
In the Liang Metandunu cave, other, much younger drawings on the same rock, some of which were made around 20.000 years ago, show that this cave was a center of artistic activity for at least 35.000 years.
Given that Sulawesi is located on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, these dates have a direct bearing on estimating when Aboriginal ancestors first arrived in Australia.
For years, the prevailing view, based largely on DNA studies and most archaeological sites, was that Homo sapiens first reached the ancient mainland of Australia and New Guinea, Sahula, about 50.000 years ago.
However, with strong evidence that Homo sapiens settled in Sulawesi and created complex symbolic art at least 67.800 years ago, it is much more likely that the controversial archaeological evidence of human presence in northern Australia around 65.000 years ago is accurate, according to Adi Agus Oktavijana of the Indonesian National Agency for Research and Innovation (BRIN).
"It is very likely that the people who created these drawings on Sulawesi were part of a larger population that later spread throughout the area and eventually reached Australia."
Many archaeologists once advocated the idea of a European "big bang" of the mind, as cave drawings, carvings, decorations, and new stone tools appear to have appeared simultaneously in France and Spain around 40.000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Spectacular Ice Age cave art at some sites, such as the Altamira and El Castillo caves, has fueled the view that symbolism and art appeared almost overnight in Europe during the Ice Age.
Since then, engraved ochre pigments, beads, and abstract symbols found at South African sites, such as Blombos Cave, which are between 70.000 and 100.000 years old, have shown that symbolic behavior was already established in Africa much earlier.
Based on these discoveries, as well as very old figurative and narrative paintings found on the island of Sulawesi, a new consensus is emerging that the story of human creativity is much deeper and more widespread, Ober tells BBC News.
"This suggests that humans have had this ability for a very long time, at least around the time they left Africa, and probably even earlier."
Watch a video about a buffalo drawing in a cave in Indonesia
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Bonus video:
