Cave paintings dating back almost 40,000 years have been discovered in Sulawesi, Indonesia.The artwork includes animal drawings and hand stencils, and each was drawn onto limestone cave sites in the south west of the country.The artwork is almost as old as those found in Europe, which experts claim raises questions about early mankind and how art developed globally in prehistoric times.The Indonesian art - the earliest of which has been radiocarbon-dated to almost 40,000 years ago - was discovered by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists.Currently, the world’s oldest dated cave art is a red dot found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, northern Spain.This particular painting is 40,800-years-old and dates to a time shortly after modern man arrived in Europe.The Spanish site and the Indonesia caves are around 8,000 miles (13,000km) apart and the findings, published in the journal Nature, raise questions about where the art first arose, according to co-author Thomas Sutikna.The University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD student, who was part of an Indonesian team that uncovered a new species of tiny human nicknamed ‘the Hobbit’ ten years ago, said rock art was ‘one of the first indicators of an abstract mind - the onset of being human as we know it’.He continued: ‘Rock art might have emerged independently at about the same time in early modern human populations in Europe and Southeast Asia, or it might have been widely practised by the first modern humans to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier - if so, then animal art could have much deeper origins.’In total, the team found 12 hand stencils and two ‘figurative animal depictions’ at seven limestone cave sites in the south west of Sulawesi.They dated them by measuring radioactive isotopes in small stalactite-like growths called ‘cave popcorn’ which had formed over the art.Using this high-precision method, known as U-series dating, samples from 14 paintings at seven caves were shown to range in age from 39,900 to 17,400 thousand years ago.As the cave popcorn only grows on top of the paintings, the U-series dates only provide minimum ages for the art, which means they could be far older.While cave art is found around the world, the art in Europe is thought to be the world’s oldest - with paintings dating back more than 30,000 years found at several sites.The art in Cantabria is so old, in fact, it has been suggested the paintings may have been made by Neanderthals who came to Europe before modern man.Other ancient paintings have been found in Gibraltar and most famously at the Lauscaux Cave in the Vezere Valley of France’s Dordogne region, which contains nearly 2,000 figures of animals, human figures and abstract signs painted onto the walls with mineral pigments.The Indonesian cave art was first recorded in the 1950s but its age was, until now, unknown.