Oldest cave painting could rewrite origins of human creativity - BBC News

A stencilled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world's oldest known cave painting, researchers say. The painting, dated to at least 67,800 years ago, shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers were reworked to create a claw-like motif, indicating an early leap in symbolic imagination. This discovery strengthens the argument that Homo sapiens had reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass, known as Sahul, by around 15,000 years earlier than some researchers argue. The find challenges the Eurocentric argument that the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe, suggesting instead that creativity was innate to our species and had roots in Africa.