Like a tribe of children armed with poster paints, early man made his mark on his surroundings by pressing his dye-covered hands and feet to the walls and the floor, by scratching or drawing around their shape and making impressions in the sand and soft clay. The vast majority of such images have washed and worn away with time, but every now and then, an archaeologist makes a chance discovery, unearthing this simplest form of human expression that has endured from time immemorial. The Lene Hara caves in Timor-Leste, first excavated in the early 1960s, contain what are perhaps the oldest hand stencils in the world. Human inhabitation of the caves began some 35,000 years ago, and their ancient inhabitants were unusually creative: Not only did they make beads and fish hooks from shell, but they carved images of themselves into the rock and painted boats, animals and stencils of their hands with a distinctive red ochre pigment.
