This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art

Really ancient sailors

The hand-drawn stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno is, to date, the oldest evidence of our presence on Wallacea, the group of islands stretching between the continental shelves of Asia and Australia. The settlement of these islands is “widely considered to have involved the first planned long-distance maritime crossing undertaken by our species,” Oktaviana and colleagues wrote.

At the time the long-lost artist placed his hand on the wall, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than they are today. Mainland Asia, Sumatra, and Borneo would have been the high points of a single landmass, joined by large expanses of lowlands that today lie beneath shallow oceans. The eastern shore of Borneo would have been a starting point, beyond which stretched several dozen kilometers of water and (as far as the eye could see on the horizon) Sulawesi.

The first people may have washed up on Sulawesi following misadventure: lost fishermen or tsunami survivors, perhaps. But at some point, people must have made the crossing on purpose, implying that they knew how to build rafts or boats, how to steer them, and that land awaited them on the other side.

Liang Metanduno pushes back the time of this crossing by almost 10,000 years. It also strongly supports arguments that people arrived in Australia earlier than archaeologists previously imagined. Archaeological evidence from a rock shelter called Madjedbebe in northern Australia suggests people lived there 65,000 years ago. But this evidence is still controversial (such is the nature of archeology), and some archaeologists argue that humans only reached the continent around 50,000 years ago.

“With the discovery of rock art dating back at least 67,800 years ago on Sulawesi, a large island located on the most plausible colonization route to Australia, it is increasingly likely that the controversial date of 65,000 years for the initial settlement of Australia is correct,” Griffith University archaeologists Adam Brumm, co-author of the recent study, told Ars.