The cave art, consisting of a negative red stencil of hands pressed against the wall, is the oldest rock art discovered and sheds new light on how humans first migrated to Australia.
The new discovery is more than 15,000 years older than previous art found in the Sulawesi region by the same research team.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, provide clues to a long-standing historical mystery about how Homo sapiens traveled from Asia to Australia.
These paintings are the first evidence that modern humans were present on the Indonesian islands at this time. The discovery also strengthens the theory that humans arrived in Australia via Papua, perhaps around 65,000 years ago, says study co-author Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Australia.
