Archaeologists have found what could be the world’s oldest artwork.

Not only could they be the oldest, but the location of the ancient art challenges the view that such creativity emerged in what is now Europe.

The cave paintings were found in Indonesia and are over 40,000 years old, a team from the University of Southampton says.

The Indonesian images were actually first discovered in their limestone cave on the island of Sulawesi in the nineteen-fifties, and were initially thought to be about 10,000 years old.

Even after the advent of modern uranium-thorium aging techniques, no-one had thought to recheck the Indonesian works, until now.

It appears that the oldest stencil is at least 39,900 years old, based on readings from the very top layer of paint.

This would make them at least 2,000 years older than earliest European hand stencils, but the Indonesian works also display greater definition and line work, suggesting either superior initial techniques or an even longer history of experimentation beforehand.

“It allows us to move away from the view that Europe was special,” Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, told reporters for the journal Nature.

“There was some idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Now we can say that’s not true.”

There are several theories for the evolution of such artwork, one of which points to the fundamental similarity between hand stencils as evidence they may have been a common practice among early humans leaving Africa.

Researchers say the discovery will likely trigger an academic gold rush, where teams will re-check many similar areas along the Southeast Asian migratory route, which the earliest modern humans travelled on out of Africa.

The full report on the research project has been published in the journal Nature.