Feb 22, 2026
A paper published in Nature recently made the news. Rock art in a cave in Sulawesi has been securely dated to about 67,800 years ago, which is much older than any previously known art. It puts the French and Spanish cave art at Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira in the shade from the point of view of antiquity, although I'm quite sure the French and the Spanish would point out, annoyingly but justifiably, that their art is nicer. The paper was a collaboration between researchers from a number of institutions in Indonesia, as well as colleagues at Griffith University (in Brisbane, my home town, though Griffith is not my alma mater unless you count that one statistical mechanics course in fourth year physics) and Lismore. Thankfully this is nothing like the recent controversy when some Oxford University researchers published a paper on Rafflesia plants and didn't credit the Indonesians who had been doing the work with them.
This dating puts it very close to the plausible edge of when human settlement in the area could have occurred. The obvious question that arises is who were the artists, were they our species or someone else? The authors of the paper assume they were indeed homo sapiens, but the only argument they advance in favour of that position is the complexity of the art. Let's look at modern human settlement first then consider other possibilities.
The state of current thinking about the dates of human settlement in Southeast Asia and Australia has been in flux for a while. When I was a university student it was usual to think humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago. Let's adopt the more concise notation from the academic literature from now on: 40kya. When Australia had its bicentenary (200 years of European colonisation) in 1988 there were also those who celebrated a bicentenary of bicentenaries of human settlement (200 times 200). More recent findings have pushed that range back further, with some uncertainty. The above paper has a helpful introduction summarising current thinking - according to their summary the current consensus range is 69-59kya. Another convention from the literature is to quote date ranges from oldest to youngest like this, so I'll stick with it, despite my natural inclination to put smaller numbers first. There have been recent findings showing likely human presence in Laos (86-68kya) and Sumatra (73-63kya). We can presume there would have been people living in other places, of course, but we don't know details. Since it's my habit to state the obvious just to confirm we all agree on what's obvious, I'll point out that a central problem of archeology and paleontology is chronic under-sampling. Not finding something doesn't mean it didn't exist - but also doesn't mean we can be sure it did. The other obvious thing I'll point out is that the first settlers in Australia got there from Southeast Asia, so settlement patterns of the two areas are closely linked.
Modern humans are thought to have migrated from Africa to the rest of the world, starting about 180kya on a non-permanent (or perhaps just unsuccessful) basis, then much later for permanent settlement. The dates I've found being discussed for permanent settlement tend to be in the 70-50kya range. Obviously the above dates on human presence in Southeast Asia and Australia put a constraint on the dates for migration from Africa as people could not have been living in Southeast Asia before their ancestors left Africa. One possible way to square that circle is to assume there were several waves of migration at different dates - low levels of migration earlier, followed by a much larger wave in the 50-70kya range. We know there was a severe genetic bottleneck among humans who migrated - modern Africans are vastly more genetically diverse than people elsewhere - so the number of people actually migrating was never large.
There is another factor that may constrain possible migration dates. If you haven't looked closely at a map of Sumatra, I encourage you to do so. Start at the northwest tip and go about a quarter of the way down. That massive lake there, Lake Toba, used to be a mountain. About 74kya it erupted in what must have been one of the largest volcanic eruptions our species has ever witnessed (assuming there was anyone there of course, which is unproven). The mind boggles, trying to imagine how much force it would require to send that much dirt and rock flying upwards. Look at that lake again, it is a big lake. We know from more recent and much smaller eruptions, like Tambora, Krakatau and Pinatubo, that large volcanic eruptions can affect climate all over the world, and generally make life harder for people everywhere. People in the immediate vicinity are affected the worst, of course, with lava flows, toxic gases, and rains of ash and stones. Lava flows from Toba are estimated to have reached the sea in both directions, the Indian Ocean and the Melaka Strait. There was a prevailing theory that this event reduced the human population everywhere to near-extinction levels, and would have completely wiped out any nearby population. The consensus has moved recently, given evidence of people in various places apparently not substantially bothered by the event, for example this paper studying sites in Northern India, and it is now considered that a catastrophic reduction in human population didn't happen. Our ancestors were almost certainly tougher and smarter than we sometimes credit, but they definitely would have lived through some hard times.
If the Sulawesi artists were our species, then there are two broad possibilities. Either their ancestors were living there since before the Toba eruption and survived the subsequent climatic disruption, or they had migrated there since the eruption, either from some local refuge or even all the way from Africa.
As for the other possibilities, John Hawks suggests they may have been Denisovans. The argument of the authors of the paper, that the sophistication of the artwork is a hallmark of our species, seems a bit weak to me, not that my opinion is all that valuable in arguments between specialists in the field. We don't know much about Denisovan culture or lifestyle, we just have some rough ideas of where they lived (essentially, all over Asia). Could they do art, or not, we don't know, but it seems premature to assume they couldn't. It is thought that cave art at La Roche-Cotard in France was the work of Neanderthals as described in this paper. While that particular work is not that impressive to our modern artistic sensibilities, or even when compared with the artwork in Sulawesi, it makes the point that homo sapiens hasn't had a monopoly on artistic expression.
There are a lot of uncertainties, so much we don't know about human occupation of Southeast Asia, but we are learning more at a rapid pace. It is becoming clearer that a large part of the story of our species and our more distant relatives happened in Southeast Asia and we are gradually making progress in finding out what that story is.