The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Adhi Oktaviana examines a slightly more recent hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

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© OKtaviana et al. 2026

Poisoned arrows or darts have long been used by cultures all over the world for hunting or warfare. For example, there are recipes for poisoning projective weapons, and deploying them in battle, in Greek and Roman historical documents, as well as references in Greek mythology and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Chinese warriors over the ages did the same, as did the Gauls and Scythians, and some Native American populations.

Archaeologists have now found traces of a plant-based poison on several 60,000-year-old quartz Stone Age arrowheads found in South Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That would make this the oldest direct evidence of using poisons on projectiles—a cognitively complex hunting strategy—and pushes the timeline for using poison arrows back into the Pleistocene.

The poisons commonly used could be derived from plants or animals (frogs, beetles, venomous lizards). Plant-based examples include curare, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the victim's respiratory system, causing death by asphyxiation. Oleander, milkweeds, or inee (onaye) contain cardiac glucosides. In Southeast Asia, the sap or juice of seeds from the ancar tree is smeared on arrowheads, which causes paralysis, convulsions, and cardiac arrest due to the presence of toxins like strychnine. Several species of aconite are known for their use as arrow poisons in Siberia and northern Japan.

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© Touchstone Pictures

A group of 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Morocco may shed new light on when our species branched off from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A team of anthropologists recently examined a collection of fossil hominin jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae that belong to hominins who probably lived very close in time to our species’ last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans. They reveal a little more about a murky but important moment in our evolutionary history.

From predators’ quarry to rock quarry

Archaeologists unearthed the 773,000-year-old bones just southwest of Casablanca in a cave aptly named Grotte à Hominidés. They’re just fragments of what used to be hominins: an adult’s lower jawbone, plus the partial lower jaw from another adult and a very young child, along with a handful of teeth and vertebrae. A hominin femur from the same layer of sediment in the cave has clear gnaw marks from sharp carnivore teeth, offering a chilling clue about how the bones got there.

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© J.P. Raynal, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca

Archaeologists have discovered Africa's oldest known cremation pyre at the base of Mount Hora in Malawi. According to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, radiocarbon testing dates the site to about 9,500 years ago, prompting a rethinking of group labor and ritual in such ancient hunter-gatherer communities.

Many cultures have practiced some form of cremation. There is a Viking cremation site known as Kalvestene on the small island of Hjarnø in Denmark, for instance. And back in 2023, we reported on an unusual Roman burial site where cremated remains had not been transported to a separate final resting place but remained in place, covered in brick tiles and a layer of lime and surrounded by several dozen bent and twisted nails—possibly an attempt to prevent the deceased from rising from the grave to haunt the living.)

But the practice was extremely rare among hunter-gatherer societies, since building a pyre is labor-intensive and requires a great deal of communal resources. There is very little evidence of cremation predating the mid-Holocene (between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago). According to the authors of this latest paper, the earliest known concentration of burnt human remains was found at Lake Mungo in Australia and dates back 40,000 years, but there is no evidence of a pyre, making it challenging to determine specific details.

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© Patrick Fahy

By Kim Crawley

The hacktivist group Anonymous recently made headlines for its declaration of a “cyber war” against Russia in response to President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade neighboring Ukraine. This is just one of many high-profile hacks claimed by Anonymous in the past decade. 

While Anonymous may be famous for their politically motivated, and usually illegal, breaches and leaks, hackers and hacktivists have a long history of creating chaos to make a point, challenging authority and pushing the bounds of the law. Hackers are also people who live for DIY and tinkering. They build safer systems and invent new technologies. In recent years, hackers have become more visible to the public than in their previous, shadowy past.

They’re now often depicted in the media, from video games to movies, comic books and toys. And their work is taken seriously, featured as experts in news stories and documentaries. Naturally, hackers and hacker culture have become an area of academic study. 

Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and professor at Harvard, studies hacker culture, online activism and hacktivist groups, with a particular focus on the hacker and activist group Anonymous. Her research on Anonymous is featured in her 2015 book, “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous”

On a recent episode of WE’RE IN, Coleman and our hosts cover topics like what hackers do, how they think, Anonymous’s operations, and the intersection between hacker culture and today’s cybersecurity industry.

[You can listen to this episode of WE’RE IN! on Apple, Spotify, Simplecast or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Coleman spoke about how hackers responded to intellectual property law and how they laid the groundwork for open source software, otherwise known as free software.

“They found patents and copyrights too restrictive and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to reinvent the law.’ That is what attracted me initially to the world of free software hacking,” Coleman said.“And over time I got to see how there’s very different types of hacking: breakers and builders and hacktivists and biohackers.”

Coleman explained that hacking is a technique and its application spans histories and industries. What connects hackers is their ability to think outside the box in both technical and non-technical areas. 

“I continue to be amazed by that sort of technical, but also political impact, of hacking,” she said.

On the podcast, Coleman also discussed how she interacted with Anonymous and how she was able to get members to open up to her for interviews. While the majority of hacktivists she studied weren’t breaking laws, she was enthralled with the organization responsible for global DDoS attacks and hacking large corporations, such as Sony, PayPal and Bank of America.  

“Anonymous became famous for their high stakes, high risk hacking. And that was something I was very interested in and wanted to learn about,” she said.

Check out the WE’RE IN! podcast to learn more about hacker culture from an academic expert.

The post WE’RE IN! Episode 15: Anonymous, Their History and Influence on Today’s Hacker Culture appeared first on Synack.