What if care is the oldest root of being human? Thirty-one thousand years ago, in a cave in the mountains of Borneo, a community performed the oldest known successful major operation and nursed a child back to life over the decade that followed. This is where compassion begins.
25-Min Documentary · Nov 2026Expedition Film
Technology
VR Experience
In developmentExhibitionIn partnership with TEBO1 Entertainment LLCIn early 2020, Professor Maxime Aubert sent his team to uncover the lifeways of the people who made some of the world's oldest cave art. The archaeological excavations were led by the late Dr Tim Ryan Maloney and co-directed by Dr India Ella Dilkes-Hall and Andika Arief Drajat Priyatno. Their patient work in the cave floor turned up what no one was looking for: a careful, deliberate burial in a remote cave we now call Liang Tebo.
The skeleton was a young person, around ten or eleven when injured, whose lower-left leg had been surgically amputated and fully healed. The remodelled, infection-free bone is the mark of skilled surgery. That the young individual lived for nine to ten years after the amputation tells us a community carried and cared for the child long after. Published in Nature, it is the oldest known successful major operation in human history.
And it does not stand alone. Around the burial, the cave walls hold some of the world's oldest hand stencils, and ochre was recovered near Tebo 1's mandible, linking the grave to art and ritual. A single cave holding evidence of surgery, art, and burial marks a turning point in the human story.
Surviving a childhood amputation and living into adulthood took more than a skilled hand. It took a community that chose to stay, and to carry one of its own for years.
Tebo 1's story rises from a land of firsts, where some of the oldest art on Earth still glows on cave walls. Against the cold logic of survival of the fittest, here is a life that an entire community chose to hold up.
Together, the healed bone and the hand stencils nearby point to one thing: our humanity exists in the choices we make to care for one another.
At the heart of it is a child who lived 31,000 years ago. And for the people rediscovering and telling their story, the care that kept Tebo 1 alive is not an idea to be argued. They have lived it, from both sides.
An archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University, Maxime is a leading authority on dating the deep past. His uranium-series dating of cave art established the age of the oldest figurative paintings ever found, moving the origins of art from Europe to the islands of Southeast Asia. His search for humanity's earliest images first brought the team to Liang Tebo. He grew up beside the same truth at the heart of this story: his father lost a leg at twelve, and care for an amputee was part of his own childhood.
Imagined reconstruction.
The child at the heart of it all. A leg lost below the knee in childhood, and bone that kept growing for ten years afterward, proof that a community carried and cared for Tebo 1 long after the surgery. Ochre in the mouth and stained teeth may be among the earliest traces of plant medicine. Newer DNA analysis hints at an endocrine difference, a body that may have been intersex. The oldest proof we have that to be human is to care. Every part of this work serves that story.
An engineer turned National Geographic Explorer, storyteller, and below-knee amputee, Albert has built his career revealing lost worlds without disturbing them, using LiDAR to lift hidden histories from the dark, from the Maya cities to the Holy Lands, in series like Lost Cities with Albert Lin. The same tools now bring Tebo 1's cave to light. He shares Tebo 1's exact loss, and has known care from the other side: when his young son's life hung by a thread, his family brought him back, his own handprints on the cave wall.
"My own community became my hand stencils on the cave wall."
Dr. Albert LinNational Geographic Explorer & Storyteller
"The story of Tebo 1's world is written on the walls of these caves, and there is so much yet to be found."
Prof. Maxime AubertWho dated the world's oldest known rock art
This November's expedition has three goals, pursued as one: to capture Liang Tebo in ultra-photorealistic LiDAR before it is lost, to film the documentary that launches Tebo 1's story, and to push into the unexplored high karst of Tondoyan in search of caves and rock art no one has yet recorded. The full logistics are in the timeline below.
From the river head, two days by canoe carry the team and its gear deep into the Sangkulirang–Mangkalihat karst to Liang Tebo, far beyond any road or signal. This is the isolation that has kept the story untouched for 31,000 years.
Five days at the discovery site. Terrestrial LiDAR and photogrammetry build a millimetre-accurate 3D archive of Liang Tebo, while drone-LiDAR survey grids strip the canopy off the surrounding karst to guide on-foot recon of new cave systems no one has entered.
A two-to-three-day river portage pushes deeper into the landscape to Tondoyan, the highest karst formation in the region and one of its least explored.
Two weeks exploring the vast cave systems of Tondoyan, dark mouths visible from across the valley but never entered, searching for the new rock art and burial chambers that could carry Tebo 1's story across the wider karst.
The team runs the river back out, carrying redundant copies of the data the whole way. What leaves is a permanent spatial archive of two of the world's most significant prehistoric landscapes, the foundation for film and for the case for UNESCO World Heritage protection.
Conducted with BRIN and the Dayak custodian communities, and screened in-region first. Indicative field plan; exact dates and durations depend on river conditions, weather, and permits. Imagery is AI-generated concept art for TEBO 1.
A single LiDAR scan serves both halves of this project. It searches the karst for caves no one has found, and it records Liang Tebo in photoreal 3D so the rest of the world can step inside.
Forest canopyLiDAR · caves revealed
Drag the drone. Aerial LiDAR sees through the canopy to the bare limestone, revealing cave openings no one has entered. Highlighted: potential cave openings. Concept visualization.
From that LiDAR data, Visualskies reconstructs Liang Tebo and its 31,000-year-old world in photoreal 3D, the foundation for the documentary and the immersive experiences that carry it to everyone.
The same LiDAR and 3D toolkit behind Lost Cities with Albert Lin, refined over fifteen years with Visualskies and now turned on Liang Tebo.
Tebo 1’s world, the Sangkulirang–Mangkalihat karst of East Kalimantan, is being eaten away by logging, mining, and palm-oil monocropping. Without action, the cave, its burial, and the ancient art our species left there could be lost within years.
Tebo 1’s home holds more ancient rock art than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, including some of the oldest figurative paintings ever found on Earth, dated in these very caves by our own Prof. Maxime Aubert. It is also counted among the ten most endangered karst landscapes in the world.
Its limestone is hunted for cement, its forest cleared for oil-palm, coal, and logging, with pressure rising as Indonesia builds its new capital, Nusantara, nearby. More than 40% of the karst here already sits under mining concession. Quarry a single tower and the caves, burials, and art inside are gone for good.
Nothing here is done to the region; it is done with it. The work is co-designed with BRIN, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesian scholars, and the Dayak custodian communities whose ancestral land this is. We follow the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: free, prior, and informed consent before we film, credit for community knowledge, and the right of communities to shape how their culture, their land, and their ancestors are represented. Screenings happen in the region before anywhere else.
The vision works on two fronts. First, bring this story of care to the world when it is badly needed: proof, written in bone and ochre, that humanity's origins lie in compassion and empathy. Second, turn that attention back onto the karst, strengthening the case for UNESCO World Heritage protection and backing the Indigenous and local stewardship already fighting to hold this landscape against mining, logging, and monocropping.
Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre tentative list (2015); Aubert et al., Nature (2018, dating the karst’s rock art); The Nature Conservancy; Mongabay.
This November's expedition is step one. From it we create a 25-minute documentary and an immersive VR experience, funded by the National Geographic Society Storytellers Program. From there a traveling exhibition and a conservation initiative follow, each retelling human origins as a story of care.
Built on the November expedition, officially funded by the National Geographic Society Storytellers Program.
A cinematic short film in English and Bahasa Indonesia, shot on the November expedition. The proof of concept, and the foundation for a feature-length telling. Inside the expedition →
A filming expedition · Nov 2026
Built directly from the expedition's photoreal LiDAR scans, a VR world that brings this remote, threatened landscape into living rooms, so any family can stand inside Tebo 1's story. Step inside →
Step inside · VR
The expedition puts this team in the cave beside the scientists who found Tebo 1. What they learn there is what lets them reach further, and The Dawn of Us reaches furthest: a scripted feature that carries a 31,000-year-old act of care to people who will never read the paper. It is a work of fiction, inspired by true events.
Developed and owned by TEBO1 Entertainment LLC, separately from the expedition and its grant. Rights & Ownership.
A walk-in pavilion of shipping containers, set down in city plazas from New York to Jakarta and finally home to Borneo. It brings two deep-time firsts into our cities, the oldest known successful surgery and the oldest figurative art our species has found, both from these same islands, to bring one idea where we need it most: that being human begins with caring for one another.
The scientists who found Tebo 1, the studio that can rebuild its world, and the storytellers bringing it to the screen.
The scientists who found Tebo 1, and the Dayak communities who hold the land and its meaning.
The senior scientist whose search for the world's oldest cave art brought the team to these caves, and a leading authority on dating the deep past. Raised by a father who is an amputee.
Archaeologist and stone-artefact specialist who led the 2020 recovery of Tebo 1.
Archaeologist and archaeobotanist who studies ancient plant use; Tebo 1's surgery, survival, and healing suggest a deep understanding of the ecological knowledge of medicinal plants.
Archaeologist and co-director of the 2020 Liang Tebo excavations.
The bioarchaeologist who recognized the healed amputation, the physical proof of skilled surgery and long-term care.
The geochronologist who directly dated the ancient remains with cutting-edge atomic analyses, helping prove the amputation happened 31,000 years ago.
One of Indonesia's foremost rock-art scholars; holds the permits, institutional trust, and the bridge to Dayak custodians.
The custodians whose landscape, knowledge, and consent anchor every part of this work.
The storytellers bringing Tebo 1 to the world across film, immersive technology, and impact.
The project's storyteller, developing the full vision, a National Geographic Explorer and a below-knee amputee who shares Tebo 1's exact injury.
Documentary director and cinematographer with a decade on blue-chip natural-history and expedition series for National Geographic, Disney+, BBC, and Discovery, and a longtime collaborator of Albert's, co-creating Iceland: The Realm of Magic.
Executive producer and impact strategist; two decades building purpose-driven, fundable storytelling.
Producer at Epic Productions, across development and field production. A relationship builder and former elite runner, he keeps teams and partners aligned to get ambitious, adventure-driven films made, drawn to stories that support healing.
Indonesian artist and documentarian present at the excavation; interprets the story on its own cultural terms.
The spatial-capture studio rebuilding the cave, and its 31,000-year-old world, from light.
LiDAR and CGI lead, with five years scanning beside Albert on Lost Cities, and founder of a London spatial-capture studio that fuses terrestrial LiDAR, drone photogrammetry, and Unreal Engine into millimetre-accurate photoreal 3D. The same pipeline that preserves the real cave rebuilds the lost world around it.
"…major implications for our understanding of the history of medicine."
Help carry a 31,000-year-old story of care into the future.
Funded by the National Geographic Society Storytellers Program, the November expedition spans science, film, immersive technology, and conservation. We are looking for partners to help build it.
Skeletal and amputation imagery: Maloney et al., Nature (2022). Field, cave, rock-art, and wildlife photography courtesy of the Liang Tebo discovery and Sangkulirang–Mangkalihat rock-art research teams (photographers including Dr Tim Ryan Maloney, Dr India Ella Dilkes-Hall, Dr. Melandri Vlok, and Kinez Riza). Reconstructions of the deep past, cinematic frames, exhibition concepts, and LiDAR visuals are AI-generated concept art, created for TEBO 1 with Google Gemini 3 Pro Image (“Nano Banana Pro”) and Imagen, and are illustrative. Portrait of Dr. Lin courtesy of National Geographic (Lost Cities); portrait of Dr India Ella Dilkes-Hall courtesy of The University of Western Australia. Full per-image credits available on request.
Both the expedition and the film are guided by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Fieldwork is carried out under Indonesian research permits with BRIN, Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency, and alongside the Dayak custodian communities of the Sangkulirang–Mangkalihat karst, on a basis of free, prior, and informed consent. The same standard carries into the fiction. Where the story draws on living cultures or on ancestral heritage, it is developed in consultation with those communities, and their guidance shapes how they are represented.
The November expedition and its funded deliverables, including the 25-minute documentary, the immersive VR experience, and the expedition's LiDAR and photogrammetry record, are produced by Epic Productions with BRIN and its research partners, and supported by the National Geographic Society Storytellers Program. Rights in that work are held under the agreements governing it.
The scripted feature film, The Dawn of Us, is a separate undertaking, developed and owned by TEBO1 Entertainment LLC, together with its graphic novel and any further entertainment adaptations. It is a work of fiction inspired by the published findings at Liang Tebo, and it is not a deliverable of the expedition or of the Storytellers Program grant. The commitments above apply to it in full.
