A brand-new discovery in an Indonesian cave has just broken a record previously set in the archaeological community, the discovery of what is believed to be the oldest cave painting found. The cave painting found was located in the limestone caves of Indonesia, and it is believed to be from around 67,800 years ago.
The Indonesian paintings were discovered by Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the BRIN Research Center for Archaeometry. And he had his belief that the paintings he had found were over 16,000 years older than the previously oldest cave paintings found in Muna Island, which were found back in 2024.
The cave painting provides evidence that early civilizations had been crossing the oceans intentionally for nearly 70,000 years, as those people had traveled from the Asian continent across Australasia and beyond that.
According to the Good News Network, the new cave paintings that were discovered have been identified as around 1,100 years older than the handprints in Spain, which are believed to be from Neandertals. They are believed to be even over 22,000 years older than the depiction of the Sulawesi warty pig, which is amazing that both the newly found cave paintings and the warty pig paintings were both discovered in Indonesia.
Diving deeper into the cave paintings themselves, the paintings show that there was intentional sea exploration for humans and Adhi Agus Oktaviana had spoken about his beliefs saying “It is very likely that the creators of these paintings were part of a population that later spread further east and eventually reached Australia,”, as well as “This research provides the oldest direct evidence of modern humans on the northern migration route to Sahul, which involved sea exploration between Kalimantan (Borneo) and Papua—an area that remains relatively unexplored archaeologically.”.
As of now, however, the researchers responsible for helping find these paintings are calling for the protection of karst areas containing ancient rock art sites to be an integral part of spatial planning and natural resource management policies.
