Indonesia's Deep-Time Cave Art as a DSSM Stress Test: The ≥67.8 ka Sulawesi Anchor Case and the ≥51 ka Regional Symbolic Field

Recent uranium-series dating indicates that hand stencil rock art in Sulawesi is at least 67,800 years old, currently representing the earliest securely dated representational marking system in Wallacea. Additional Indonesian cave art assemblages — including Leang Karampuang, Leang Tedongnge, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, and sites across the Maros–Pangkep and Kalimantan karst systems — preserve figurative and stencil-based imagery dated to ≥51,000 years before present. These include repeated negative hand stencils, faunal depictions, and composite figures placed on fixed cave surfaces across extended time intervals. This study analyzes the Indonesian cave art record using the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM), an operational framework for identifying stabilized symbolic infrastructures through observable structural signals. The ≥67.8 ka Sulawesi assemblage is treated as an anchor case demonstrating mnemonic anchoring, motif stabilization, spatial constraint, and cross-generational persistence. The ≥51 ka corpus is then evaluated as a regional stress test of DSSM expectations. The central claim is measured: Indonesian cave art is more parsimoniously interpreted not as the origin point of symbolic behavior, but as evidence of already stabilized symbolic practices operating well before