This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 56%. (I'm a bot)
> The discovery of possibly the oldest piece of rock art catalogued to date could point the way to even older art, made by the ancient humans who travelled through the Indonesian archipelago thousands of years ago.
> The image has been dated to at least 45,500 years old, which would make it the oldest human rock art on record.
> One of the team leaders, Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, said the image was familiar to researchers, as it crops up again and again in local cave paintings.
> "Rock art produced in limestone caves can sometimes be dated using uranium-series analysis of calcium carbonate deposits, [or] 'cave popcorn', that form naturally on the cave wall surface used as a 'canvas' for the art," Professor Aubert said.
> Professor Brumm said as they dated increasingly older cave art in the Indonesian archipelago and its surrounding area, they would strengthen the evidence for rock art being a piece of cultural heritage passed down over thousands of years as humans made their first epic voyage into the unknown.
> "We think that there is rock art somewhere in those islands that will potentially date back to 65,000 years or even earlier - it's just a matter of looking and eventually we might find it."
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