Where's the Oldest Cave Art in the World?

Even though we don’t know why these artists made their creations, cave art discoveries can provide insight into the history of human migration, thought, language and storytelling, explains Maxime Aubert, an archaeology professor at Griffith University in Australia.

“It’s an intimate window into the past,” Aubert says. “Someone put their hand there, 68,000 years ago and you can see it.” 

However, the record for oldest cave art is hard to pin down. As dating techniques improve and new sites are discovered, archaeologists continue to revisit their understanding of when humans (or human ancestors) began creating art.

Here are some of the oldest discovered examples of cave art in the world. 

Hand stencils are one of the most common forms of prehistoric rock art. Tens of thousands of years ago, people all over the world—including children—left their mark by holding their hands up to cave walls and blowing colored pigment around them to create an outline.

Using uranium-series dating—a technique that measures the decay of radioactive elements in mineral deposits that form over cave art—Aubert’s research team identified a faded 67,800-year-old hand stencil in the Liang Metanduno cave on Muna Island, off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Aubert says the stencil artist could have been a modern human (Homo sapiens) or another human ancestor. 

In addition to being the oldest known example of cave art (for now), the hand stencil has a unique design: At least one of the fingertips appears pointy and clawlike, as though the artist retouched or reshaped it.

“That’s a style that we’ve identified in Sulawesi before,” Aubert says, who co-authored a paper about the discovery in 2026. “It’s a style that, as far as we know, is unique to Sulawesi.” 

Sulawesi sits along ancient migration routes that early humans used as they moved through Southeast Asia toward Australia. When Aubert and his colleagues began documenting cave art on and around Sulawesi dated to be 35,000 years old or more, their findings were met with skepticism; many researchers believe cave art to be a phenomenon that emerged in Europe. Aubert’s work challenges this view by documenting various types of cave art in Southeast Asia that predate known European examples.

In 2025, researchers announced they’d dated a hand stencil in the Maltravieso cave in Cáceres, Spain, to 66,700 years ago, and suggested a Neanderthal may have made it. But Aubert has raised concerns about the dating methods these researchers used to determine the stencil's age.

The team behind the research has drawn criticism before. In 2018, some of the same researchers dated a ladder-shaped drawing in a Spanish cave to 65,000 years ago, again suggesting Neanderthals as the artists. Two years later, another group of researchers published a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution critiquing the earlier team’s dating methods. As with all of the cave art on this list, interpretations of the Maltravieso hand stencil may evolve as archaeologists make new discoveries and apply different dating techniques.

Other notable cave art discoveries in Europe include Spain's El Castillo cave, dated to about 40,000 years old, France's Chauvet cave, dated to about 36,000 years old and Romania's Coliboaia cave, dated between 30,000 to 35,000 years old. Stylistic similarities suggest figurative drawings were widespread across Europe during the Ice Age. 

Some cave art appears to tell a narrative or story. In 2024, Aubert’s research team published a paper about a narrative painting in the Leang Karampuang cave on Sulawesi. They estimate the painting, which depicts a pig and three human-bird hybrids, is at least 51,200 years old, making it the oldest known narrative cave painting. While its exact meaning remains unclear, it appears to have been intentionally composed as a story.

In the same study, researchers revised a previous estimate for a different narrative painting in a Sulawesi cave to 48,000 years ago. That scene shows a mix of animals and humanoid figures and may represent a hunting scene. In another of the island’s caves, Aubert’s team identified a 45,500-year-old painting of a Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis).

People who live around Sulawesi have long been aware of the unique art in local caves, but archaeologists are still pinning down just how old these works are. The resulting date estimates have challenged previously held assumptions about the evolution of art as well as the migration patterns of early humans.

One of the first Sulawesi hand stencils that Aubert's team studied is estimated to be about 39,900 years old. That's 27,900 years younger than the oldest hand stencil they have dated. As far as artistic trends go, that’s a pretty long time to stay in style.

“Maybe it’s just an instinct in us,” Aubert says. He recalls when his son, as a toddler, put a hand on a window and blew hot air around it to make an imprint on the glass—a version of what humans have been doing for millennia.