In A limestone cave sits the world's oldest hand stencil. Next to it is a drawing of a pig-deer. Together, they are turning our understanding of the birth of art on its head. Around 40,000 years ago, early Europeans were the first to begin smearing pigment on walls, or so the story goes. But now paintings of animals and hand stencils on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have been identified as just as old as their European equivalents -and in some cases older. The most striking of these looks like a female babirusa, known as a pig-deer, in profile (pictured, right). A barely perceptible red line below may represent the ground that it is walking on. Next to this painting, which adorns the ceiling of a 4-metre-high cave, is a human hand stencil, made by pressing a hand against the rock and spraying wet pigments over it.
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