The painting was discovered in Indonesia.

13:31, Thu, Jan 22, 2026 Updated: 13:32, Thu, Jan 22, 2026

The world's oldest painting is 67,800 years old

The world's oldest painting is 67,800 years old (Image: Nature)

The world's oldest known cave painting, an outline of a hand, was found in Indonesia. The stencilled outline of a hand whose fingers were reworked was found on the island of Sulawesi, east of Borneo. Researchers say the rework was to create a claw-like motif, indicating early signs of symbolic imagination. The painting dates to at least 67,999 years ago. This is 1,100 years earlier than the previous known record, a controversial hand stencil in Spain.

The find also shows that Homo sapiens had reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass known as Sahul by around 15,000 years earlier than some researchers argue. Over the past decade, a series of discoveries on Sulawesi has overturned the old idea that art and abstract thinking in our species burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there, BBC reported.

Cave art is seen as a key indicator of early human creativity and imagination. It has been tied to Europe as the oldest cave art was believed to be in Spain.

Professor Adam Brumm of Griffiths University in Australia, who co-led the project, told BBC: "When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that's what we were taught – the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe. But now we're seeing traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art in Indonesia, which makes that Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain."

The world's oldest painting

The world's oldest known painting, an outline of a hand, was found in Indonesia (Image: Nature)

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The discovery comes from Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna, a small island off southeastern Sulawesi. An ancient artist created the image by pressing a hand against the cave wall and blowing or spitting pigment around it, leaving a negative hand outline on the rock.

One fragmentary hand stencil there is overlain by thin mineral crusts that, when analysed, was found to have a minimum age of 67,800 years, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art anywhere in the world.