This article was originally published on April 16, 2021.
In 2018, researcher Maxime Aubert and his crew ventured into a hidden valley about an hour’s walk from the nearest road on the spider-like Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They had just slept on the porch of a local family’s rice farm after a few glasses of ballo, a fermented sugar palm alcohol that the area is famous for.
Just across the valley, Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, could glimpse the Leang Tedongnge cave. The team traveled to see it after hearing reports from Basran Burhan, an Indonesian archaeologist. Aubert, who studies ancient cave art, had previously studied what were possibly the world’s oldest-known manmade examples from as long as 44,000 years ago — but, as he would later learn, the art here at Leang Tedongnge would date back even further.
