Newly discovered cave paintings an estimated 40,000 years old may provide insight into how humans learned to create art.

According to BBC News, scientists found the artwork in a cave on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi. The researchers published a study on the paintings, of which kind had only been confirmed in Western Europe, in the journal Nature.

"Rock art is one of the first indicators of an abstract mind - the onset of being human as we know it," study co-author Thomas Sutikna, a PhD student at the University of Wollongong's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said in a press release. "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 practiced by the first modern humans to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier - if so, then animal art could have much deeper origins."

The Australian and Indonesian scientists dated the artwork by analyzing layers of stalactite-like growths that formed over tracings of human hands. The paintings appeared to depict hooved animals that could be found on the island and there were even some drawings of humans.

"The minimum age for (the outline of the hand) is 39,900 years old, which makes it the oldest hand stencil in the world," Dr. Maxime Aubert, of Griffith University in Queensland, told BBC News. "Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one."

Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, told BBC News the new study has significant weight for early humans.

"It is a really important find; it enables us to get away from this Euro-centric view of a creative explosion that was special to Europe and did not develop in other parts of the world until much later," he said. "That's kind of my gut feeling.

"The basis for this art was there 60,000 years ago; it may even have been there in Africa before 60,000 years ago and it spread with modern humans."