Paris, Oct. 8 (AFP): The silhouette of a hand on a cave wall in Indonesia is 40,000 years old, showing that Europe was not the birthplace of art as long believed, researchers said on today.

Created by spraying reddish paint around an open hand pressed against rock, the stencil was made about the same time — and possibly before — early humans were leaving artwork on cave walls around Europe.

In the same cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a painting of a pig was dated to about 35,000 years ago, the Indonesian and Australian team reported in Nature.

The discovery, they said, throws up two theories, both of which challenge the conventional wisdom around the history of human artistic expression. Art either arose independently but simultaneously in different parts of the world — or was brought by Homo sapiens when he left Africa for a worldwide odyssey. “Europeans can’t exclusively claim to be the first to develop an abstract mind any more,” Anthony Dosseto of Australia’s University of Wollongong said.