The Silent Walls of Sulawesi: Lasers Reveal the World’s Oldest Cave Art

The jungle is a voracious eater of history. In the humid embrace of the Indonesian archipelago, decay is the default state. Wood rots, bone crumbles, and iron rusts into oblivion. For archaeologists, this environment is a relentless adversary. It actively works to erase the footprints of early humanity, leaving behind a blank slate where a rich chronicle should be. This geological amnesia has long distorted our understanding of human expansion. It allowed a Eurocentric bias to fester, suggesting that the spark of abstract thought ignited only in the cool, dry caves of the West. The silence of the tropics was not an absence of people, but an absence of preservation. This void is the antagonist. It creates a false narrative that our ancestors in this region were merely passing through, leaving no mark, no culture, and no permanent sign. The darkness of the limestone karsts seemed to confirm this emptiness, holding its secrets tight against the erosion of aeons.

These results were observed under controlled laboratory conditions, so real-world performance may differ.

Then, a beam of light cut through the dark. Not a torch, but a laser. Researchers employed laser-ablation U-series dating, a precise tool capable of bypassing the limitations of traditional carbon dating. Instead of analysing the pigment, which often vanishes, this method targets the calcite 'popcorn' that forms on top of the painting. It dates the canvas rather than the ink.

Redefining the oldest cave art

The results from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island were unexpected. The laser analysis of the overlying calcite yielded a uranium-series date of 71,600 years ago. This provides a minimum age for the underlying hand stencil of 67,800 years. This figure is staggering. It pushes the timeline back significantly.

Previously, the record for such creativity was held by a hand stencil in Spain, attributed to Neanderthals. The Muna minimum exceeds that European date by over a thousand years and predates other findings in the nearby Maros-Pangkep region by more than 16,000 years. The implications are profound. This discovery suggests that the humans making the crossing to Sahul—the combined landmass of Australia and New Guinea—were culturally sophisticated long before they set sail. The initial peopling of this region, occurring roughly 65,000 years ago, likely involved communities who had already mastered the practice of leaving their handprints on the stone, defying the silence of the jungle.