It remained an island, though a slightly larger one at glacial-maximum sea levels.

The foragers of Ice Age Sulawesi lived in a landscape of karst limestone — the same landscape that forms the caves like Leang Bulu Bettue that have preserved their art and, now, their bones.

The karst offered specific resources: shelter in the caves, freshwater from karst springs, and the rich biodiversity of tropical forests.

The forests of Sulawesi, isolated on their island for millions of years, had developed distinctive endemic fauna — the babirusa (a pig-like animal with elaborate upward-curving tusks), the anoa (small forest buffalo), the Sulawesi warty pig whose image appears in the earliest cave paintings at the site.

The foragers who used Leang Bulu Bettue had already been in Sulawesi for a very long time by the period of the betel nut evidence.