We had been exploring the cave art of this part of Sulawesi with our scientific counterparts in Indonesia, the National Research Centre for Archaeology and the local cultural heritage preservation branch, based in Makasa, as well as our colleagues from various other local counterparts organisations. It's an amazingly rich rock art province there in Sulawesi. This cave is in a really well explored area. You know, our teams have been through there a million times and then one day, one of the guys just looked up and noticed what seemed to be an entrance to a high-level cave, climbed up a victory route to investigate it, and then bang, there's this incredible new rock art site in there that's essentially like nothing we've ever seen before in this entire region. It's this beautiful painting of some sort of hunting scene involving what seemed to be these wild animals, a type of wild pig, as well as a type of miniature buffalo known as an anoa, only found in this island. Very small but dangerous animals. Amongst this group of animals running across the cave wall essentially, you can see a whole group of these tiny little hunters, which at first we thought, wow, these look like little people hunting these animals, but when you look closely at them, you can see that the figures themselves have been portrayed as part human, part animal creatures. They're what we call thearian throbes, like for example, one of them seems to have the head of a bird and another one seems to have a tail. They're armed with what seemed to be spears or ropes that they're using to hunt these wild animals. It's suggested to us this extraordinary scene shows some sort of story or myth. From what we know, here it's complex, it's fully complex and it could be linked to two looks for your own. Exactly. We had never seen anything like that at all anywhere in Sula Waisis, so we were stunned by the implications of this image. Rock art is exceptionally difficult to date in the best of circumstances. We find the rock art in these limestone caves where naturally over time these mineral growths develop all over the cave wall and in some cases when we're very lucky these mineral growths develop over their ancient rock art. And they're like a castle, a carbon coating and we can date them with the uranium series dating. So essentially we can date when those scafe popcorn formed on top of the painting so it provides us with a minimum aim. So that's why we can say that this panel here is at least 43.9000 years old so it could be much older than that. This was just mind boggling because this showed us that this was possibly the oldest rock art anywhere on the face of the planet. It's also the earliest what we call figurative art and an image of something that formally resembles what it's intended to represent. To me this site is like hultum of rock art. If everything there there's a few ant stencils, animal paintings, there's human, there's a narrative scene, there's human animal features, it's all there and it's not just all there later, it's all there from the beginning. It's just amazing and to me it just shows how much more rock art is out there waiting to be discovered that completely changes our understanding of the human story. Absolutely.