The Sulawesi cave art discoveries, which have continued to produce older and older dates for figurative painting, have established the island as one of the primary locations where we can observe the earliest expressions of symbolic and artistic thinking in modern humans.

In 2025, researchers published evidence of even older hominin activity on Sulawesi — stone tools dating to more than a million years ago, suggesting that earlier human relatives (possibly Homo erectus or a related species) had crossed significant water barriers to reach the island long before modern humans arrived.

The specific cave where the older betel nut specimen was found — Leang Bulu Bettue — is part of this important archaeological landscape.

A 2025 publication documented “a near-continuous archaeological record of Pleistocene human occupation” at Leang Bulu Bettue, indicating that the cave was used repeatedly by modern humans over an extended period.