Ancient cave paintings dating back at least 40,000 years on Sulawesi Island in Indonesia are actually some of the world's earliest evidence of cave art, said a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists.

These cave paintings were already discovered and documented in the 1950s. Experts at the time assumed this art was less than 10,000 years old based on the erosion evidence inside the Sulawesi limestone caves. 

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Drawings from several caves were analyzed by expert Maxime Aubert from Griffith University. This is the first time these paintings were carefully and meticulously examined and the team found out they were older than 10,000 years.

The oldest known cave paintings in the world were found in the Chauvet and Lascaux cave paintings in France and the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain. This Indonesian discovery opposes the belief that cave art originated in Europe.

The team found some calcite growths that contain uranium spread among the drawings Archaeologists call these calcite growths "cave popcorn."

The Sulawesi cave art is dotted with cave popcorn. It includes 12 stencil drawings of human hands along with drawings of babirusas which are primitive pigs. They are dated back to 39,900 to 17,400 years ago.

These findings are pivotal to human evolution and suggest how modern humans came to be, said Thomas Sutikna from the University of Wollongong. The advent of cave art heralds the human mind's capacity to be abstract and build concepts. This is solid evidence of how modern humans evolved through time.

Aubert said it was always previously thought early western Europeans were the precursors of art but this Southeast Asian evidence of cave art also proves the human concept of art and creativity is spread around the globe and could have deeper origins in Africa.  

This study was published in the scientific journal, Nature.

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