Indonesia's Deep-Time Cave Art as a DSSM Stress Test

Recent discoveries and refinements in the dating of Indonesian cave paintings—most notably the figurative panels and hand stencils of Leang Karampuang, Leang Tedongnge, and associated cave systems in the Maros–Pangkep karst of Sulawesi, alongside painted sequences in Kalimantan—now place some of the world’s earliest known representational imagery at or beyond 51,000 years before present. These include large-scale depictions of endemic fauna, such as Sulawesi warty pigs, therianthropic figures, and extensive negative hand stencils. These motifs were executed repeatedly on fixed cave surfaces across deep time. This paper argues that these paintings should not be treated as isolated artistic breakthroughs or anomalous precursors to later symbolic systems. When examined through the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM), they constitute evidence of an already stabilized symbolic field—characterized by mnemonic anchoring, intergenerational persistence, formal constraint, and distributed symbolic authority—long before the emergence of agriculture, sedentism, monumentality, or writing.