AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Scientists have identified what they believe to be the oldest known rock art in the world inside a cave in Indonesia.
ADAM BRUMM: So this is a human hand mark created by blowing paint around a human hand that's held against the cave wall.
CHANG: That is Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Australia. In a study out this month, he and his team estimate that the image is more than 67,000 years old.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This particular cave is on Indonesia's Sulawesi island, and inside the cave, you'll see several paintings in this brownish, reddish, muddy pigment. There's an image of a chicken, and to the right of that...
BRUMM: There's this strange sort of depiction of what seems to be a human-like figure, possibly mounted on a horse, but if you could imagine a horse sort of transforming into a spider.
SUMMERS: And if your eyes are sharp enough, between the chicken and the horse spider...
BRUMM: You'll see this - sort of this faded, sort of slightly salmon-pinky-like discoloration in the rock - very, very faded. And then when you know what you're looking for, you'll just see these outlines of human fingers.
CHANG: At first, researchers actually missed the painting of the hand. But in 2015, an eagle-eyed archaeologist named Adhi Agus Oktaviana looked a little more closely.
ADHI AGUS OKTAVIANA: When I see this, it's - ah, it's a hand stencil behind the chicken.
CHANG: That's right - a hand stencil behind the chicken.
SUMMERS: Adam Brumm's team estimates the hand is tens of thousands of years older than the surrounding images. And dating the cave art was a challenge of its own. Over time, minerals accumulated directly on top of the cave art, and by figuring out the age of those mineral growths - an estimated 67,800 years old - they deduced that the hand stencil underneath must be at least that ancient.
CHANG: The researchers write that the hand stencil was likely created by our species, Homo sapiens. And though there is a remarkable artistic tradition of cave art in Europe, Brumm says this finding widens the lens on where and when creativity emerged.
BRUMM: It really that that old sort of Eurocentric view on the emergence of cave art and human creative activity in Europe is wrong, and in fact, we've got probably cave art emerging among our species probably before we even left Africa, OK? So before we set foot in Europe and before we set foot in Southeast Asia, I think we had humans making rock art somewhere in Africa, but we just haven't found it yet and dated it.
SUMMERS: The study and a photo of the hand are in the journal Nature.
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