Twenty one days in East Kalimantan, at Liang Tebo and across the karst of the Tondoyan massif, recording the burial chamber and the hand stencil panels around it with laser mapping and photogrammetry. We go with Prof. Maxime Aubert, whose team found the burial in 2020.
Thirty one thousand years ago someone amputated a child's leg in that cave, and the child lived for years afterward. It is the oldest known surgery in the human record, and a below the knee amputation nearly identical to Albert's own.
The handprints stencilled on the walls around the burial are the people who cared for that child. The expedition produces a 25 minute film in English and Bahasa Indonesia and a first virtual reconstruction of a site almost nobody can physically reach. A feature, a graphic novel and a travelling exhibit follow in 2027.
The whole project rests on one finding, published in Nature in 2022.