Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known cave painting in the world is a simple hand stencil found on Muna Island, Indonesia, dated to at least 67,800 years ago. This discovery was announced in January 2026 and predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of millennia. The image was created by pressing a hand against the rock and spraying pigment around it.
A team of artists working between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago created the gallery of rhinoceroses and hyenas in the Chauvet Cave in France. These paintings were discovered in 1994 and are the most technically advanced figurative art of the Paleolithic period. The artists sculpted the rock surface using bas-relief techniques to give the animals a three-dimensional presence.
The hand stencils in the Cave of the Hands in Argentina date from 7,300 BC to 700 AD, spanning a period of over 8,000 years. The cave walls also depict guanacos, rheas, and felines, along with geometric shapes and hunting scenes. The majority of the hands are left hands, suggesting the artists held the spraying pipe with their right hand.
The shamanic hypothesis was developed by David Lewis-Williams and posits that artists entered trance states within dark, acoustically resonant chambers to paint visions of the spirit world. This theory suggests that flickering torchlight and echoing sounds induced hallucinations that the artists captured on the rock. The presence of abstract symbols like lines and dots supports the idea that these images correlate with animal mating cycles in a lunar calendar.
A painting of a warty pig in the Leang Tedongnge cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, discovered in 2021, is recognized as the oldest known figurative art in human history. This artwork is dated to over 45,500 years ago and was published in the journal Science Advances. The pig is depicted with a minimum age of 35,400 years in the Timpuseng cave.