A stencilled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world’s oldest known cave painting, researchers say.

It shows a red outline of a hand whose fingers were reworked, researchers say, to create a claw-like motif which indicates an early leap in symbolic imagination.

The painting has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago – around 1,100 years before the previous record, a controversial hand stencil in Spain.

The find also strengthens the argument that our species, Homo sapiens, had reached the wider Australia–New Guinea landmass, known as Sahul, by around 15,000 years earlier than some researchers argue.

Over the past decade, a series of discoveries on Sulawesi has overturned the old idea that art and abstract thinking in our species burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there.

Cave art is seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways – the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science.

Early paintings and engravings show people not just reacting to the world, but representing it, sharing stories and identities in a way no other species is known to have done.

Professor Adam Brumm of Griffiths University in Australia, who co-led the project, told BBC News, that the latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, adds to the emerging view that there was no awakening for humanity in Europe. Instead, creativity was innate to our species, the evidence for which stretches back to Africa, where we evolved.

“When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught – the creative explosion in humans occurred in a small part of Europe. But now we’re seeing traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art in Indonesia, which makes that Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain”.

The oldest Spanish cave art is a red hand stencil in Maltravieso cave in Western Spain, dated to be at least 66,700 years old – though this is controversial and some experts don’t think it to be that old.

In 2014, hand stencils and animal figures dating back at least 40,000 years were found in Sulawesi, followed by a hunting scene that is at least 44,000 year old, and then a narrative pig and human painting dated to at least 51,200 years ago. Each step pushed sophisticated image making further back in time, according to Professor Maxime Aubert of Griffiths University.

“We started with minimum ages of at least 40,000 years, the same time as in Europe, but by getting closer to the pigment we’ve pushed the rock art in Sulawesi back by at least another 28,000 years”.

The latest discovery is from a limestone cave called Liang Metanduno on Muna, a small island off south eastern Sulawesi. It has been spray-painted: an ancient graffiti artist pressed their hand flat against the cave wall, then blew or spat a mouthful of pigment around it so that, when they pulled the hand away, a negative outline was left behind on the rock.

One fragmentary hand stencil there is overlain by thin mineral crusts that, when analysed, was found to have a minimum age of 67,800 years, making it the oldest reliably dated cave art anywhere in the world.

Crucially, the artist did more than simply spray pigment around a hand pressed to the wall, the researchers say.

After the original stencil was made, the outlines of the fingers were carefully altered – narrowed and elongated to make it look more claw-like; a creative transformation that Brumm argues is “a very us thing to do”.

He notes that there was no evidence of that experimentation in any of the art produced by our sister species, Neanderthals, in their cave paintings in Spain around 64,000 years ago. Even that is hotly contested because some researchers question the dating method.

Until this latest discovery on Muna, all the paintings in Sulawesi had come from the Maros Pangkep karst in the island’s south west. The fact that this much older stencil turns up on the opposite side of Sulawesi, on a separate satellite island, suggests that making images on cave walls was not a local experiment but deeply embedded in the cultures that spread across the region.

Brumm says years of fieldwork by Indonesian colleagues have revealed “hundreds of new rock art sites” across remote areas, with some caves used repeatedly over tens of thousands of years. At Liang Metanduno, other, much younger paintings on the same panel – some produced as late as about 20,000 years ago – show that this single cave was a focus for artistic activity stretching over at least 35,000 years.

Because Sulawesi lies on the northern sea route between mainland Asia and ancient Sahul, the dates have direct implications for assessing when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians first arrived.

For years, the mainstream view – based largely on DNA studies and most archaeological sites – was that Homo sapiens first reached the ancient Australia–New Guinea landmass, Sahul, about 50,000 years ago.

But with firm evidence that Homo sapiens were settled on Sulawesi and making complex symbolic art at least 67,800 years ago, it makes it much more likely that controversial archaeological evidence for humans in northern Australia by about 65,000 years is correct, according to Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of the Indonesia’s national research and innovation Agency (BRIN).

“It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia.”

Many archaeologists once argued for a European “big bang” of the mind because cave paintings, carvings, ornaments and new stone tools all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago, soon after Homo sapiens arrived there.

Spectacular Ice Age cave art in places like Altamira and El Castillo encouraged the idea that symbolism and art switched on almost overnight in Ice Age Europe. Since then, engraved ochre, beads and abstract marks from South African sites such as Blombos Cave, some 70,000–100,000 years old, have shown that symbolic behaviour was already established in Africa long before.

Along with very old figurative and narrative paintings from Sulawesi, a new consensus is being shaped; that there was a much deeper and more widespread story of creativity, Aubert told BBC News.

“What it suggests is that humans would have had that capacity for a very long time, at least when they left Africa – but probably before that”.