Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

Abstract

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world^1-5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia-the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi^1,3-5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo². Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. ⁵) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals⁶, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka⁷ involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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