<P> The hand images are often negative (stencilled). Besides these there are also depictions of human beings, guanacos, rheas, felines and other animals, as well as geometric shapes, zigzag patterns, representations of the sun, and hunting scenes . Similar paintings, though in smaller numbers, can be found in nearby caves . There are also red dots on the ceilings, probably made by submerging their hunting bolas in ink, and then throwing them up . The colours of the paintings vary from red (made from hematite) to white, black or yellow . The negative hand impressions date to around 550 BC, the positive impressions from 180 BC, while the hunting drawings are calculated to more than 10,000 years old . Most of the hands are left hands, which suggests that painters held the spraying pipe with their right hand . </P> <P> There are rock paintings in caves in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma . In Thailand, caves and scarps along the Thai - Burmese border, in the Petchabun Range of Central Thailand, and overlooking the Mekong River in Nakorn Sawan Province, all contain galleries of rock paintings . In Malaysia the oldest paintings are at Gua Tambun in Perak, dated at 2000 years, and those in the Painted Cave at Niah Caves National Park are 1200 years old . The anthropologist Ivor Hugh Norman Evans visited Malaysia in the early 1920s and found that some of the tribes (especially Negritos) were still producing cave paintings and had added depictions of modern objects including what are believed to be cars . (See prehistoric Malaysia .) </P> <P> In Indonesia the caves at Maros in Sulawesi are famous for their hand prints . About 1500 negative handprints have also been found in 30 painted caves in the Sangkulirang area of Kalimantan; preliminary dating analysis puts their age in the range of 10,000 years old . In October 2014 it was announced that the Maros painting had been dated as being about 40,000 years old . Dr Maxime Aubert, of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, said that the minimum age for the outline of a hand was 39,900 years old, which made it "the oldest hand stencil in the world" and added, "Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one ." </P> <P> The Padah - Lin Caves of Burma contain 11,000 - year - old paintings and many rock tools . </P>

The cave murals of southern france and northern spain