History of art rewritten as these 40,000-year-old cave paintings are discovered

Archaeologists in Indonesia have discovered animal drawings and hand stencils believed to be 40,000 years old.

16:58 09 October 2014

Cave paintings dating back almost 40,000 years that were discovered by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists on the island of Sulawesi have sparked questions about early humans and the origins of art itself.

Prior to the discovery, it has been thought that Europe had the world’s oldest rock art with paintings dating back more than 30,000 years.

The world’s oldest dated cave art is a red dot found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabrina, northern Spain, which was painted 40,800 years ago.

Co-author of a report into the findings, Thomas Sutikna, a University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD student, said rock art was "one of the first indicators of an abstract mind - the onset of being human as we know it".

He said: "Rock art might have emerged independently at about the same time in early modern human populations in Europe and Southeast Asia, or it might have been widely practised by the first modern humans to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier - if so, then animal art could have much deeper origins."