Hands Across The Globe
A figurative painting of a pig-deer or babirusa and hand stencil from one of the caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia. (Maxime Aubert)
Are hand stencils, older than 40,000 years in Sulawesi, the visual relic of Humans’ journey out of Africa?
A paper published in Nature today (Aubert et al. 2014) reveals U-Th dates on calcite deposits formed over painted hand stencils and shows the stencils are older than 39,900 years old along with figurative art that is older than 35,400 years old.
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