This was not a sporting venture. It entailed organization, collective information and cultural interpretation. That concept is now fossilized in a dim hand stencil in one of the limestone caves of the island of Sulawesi off Indonesia of an age as old as 67,800 years older than any other securely dated cave image so far known.
The stencil remains in fragments on the wall of Liang Metanduno cave at Muna a satellite island of the southeast of Sulawesi. A portion of palm and fingers only is left, yet the drawing still has a weird flourish: the negative lines of the fingers have been purposely thinned out into a sharp, claw-like shape, a stylistic type which has been referred to as peculiar to Sulawesi. The impact is significant since making a simple hand mark a modified symbols both implies that the artists were not merely abandoning presence, but also making meaning intentionally.
The age is based on of uranium-series analysis of microscopic calcium carbonate deposits, or so-called “cave popcorn”, which were deposited as a result of the pigment being deposited. Those mineral crusts were used to determine the age of the underlying art by measuring them. Occasionally, mineral layers under pigment may provide a maximum age range also, although the point here is conservative: the hand image is no younger than 67,800 years. An adjacent stencil with far younger constraints is also in the same panel, a fact that supports the belief that this cave wall was used as a canvas many times over a deep time period, with intervals between episodes of painting lasting a minimum of 35,000 years.
This time is one of the most conspicuous elements of the site that resemble more engineering than creativity: not a single creative burst, but a continuity of practice that was maintained through the generations as the environments, coastline, and traveling directions were transformed.
Outside the history of art, the stencil figures in the centre of a previous debate on how individuals arrived at Sahul the landmass of the Ice Age that once linked Australia and New Guinea. The Sulawesi dates put humans on a suggested path of a northward movement of people, backing theories that travelers traversed Sunda (then-extended Southeast Asian terrain) by island arcs into Sahul. The finding is often contextualised as an indication of the origin of the Indigenous Australians, as it gives an early indication of the existence of modern human in Wallacea, where sea level would have been crossed even during reduced sea levels.
Another way that has been narrowing that window has been Genetics. One of the most lucid genetic histories of Sahul has been offered as a large-scale study of close to 2,500 mitochondrial genomes of Indigenous communities in Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific suggesting entry of as many as 60,000 years ago and suggesting movement along multiple avenues. When placed next to the Sulawesi stencil, the image that is created is not the art tradition that flourished upon arrival, but the symbolic practices that accompanied people during the time they laid plans of crossings, revisited pivotal locations, and symbolized membership and identity.
The hand itself is silent dried blood, half-black fingers, rock. However, as an aged object, it acts as a reference point in an ever-changing map: it is a sign that movement over long distances in this area was not retrogressive but parallel to stable cultural practices.
