Australian scientists find 10,000-year-old stone carvings

A team of Australian scientists on Friday said they discovered ancient stone carvings in an East Timor cave dating back at least 10,000 years.

The team of archaeologists and paleontologists had been looking for the fossilized remains of extinct giant rats in the Lene Hara cave in East Timor, while Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO's) Dr Ken Aplin accidentally saw the stylized face carvings in the limestone roof.

"One of our East Timorese colleagues was sitting up on top of a big block of limestone and I looked up to see what he was up to and as I did, my head-torch shone across the face of the limestone and I saw these incredible faces engraved on the surface," he told ABC News on Friday.

"I called out to Sue, the archaeologist, 'Sue - you didn't tell me there were faces engraved here' and she said 'there aren't any' and I went 'come and have a look at this' and her mouth fell open when she saw them."

The Lene Hara carvings, or petroglyphs, are frontal, stylized faces each with eyes, a nose and a mouth. One has a circular headdress with rays that frame the face.

The statement released by CSIRO showed uranium isotope dating by colleagues at Australia's University of Queensland revealed the one of Lene Hara carvings to be around 10,000 to 12,000 years old, placing it in the late Pleistocene period. The other faces could not be dated but are likely to be equally ancient.

Although stylized engravings of faces occur throughout Melanesia, Australia and the Pacific, the Lene Hara petroglyphs are the only examples that have been dated to the Pleistocene.

No other petroglyphs of faces are known to exist anywhere on the island of Timor.

"Recording and dating the rock art of Timor should be a priority for future research, because of its cultural significance and value in understanding the development of art in our past," Professor Professor Sue O'Connor of The Australian National University said in a statement released on Friday.

The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.