In 2015 a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists unearthed ornaments that were up to 30,000 years old - including disc-shaped beads made from the tooth of a babirusa or deer-pig - from a limestone cavern on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Intriguingly, while the archaeologists found thousands of animal bones and teeth in the cave - clearly the remains of ancient meals - there were not many babirusa bones, suggesting they had not been commonly eaten.

However, they found jewellery ingeniously manufactured from the teeth of the primitive pigs, which are found only in Sulawesi and some neighbouring islands.

"What this seems to suggest is the babirusa were not important to them from a subsistence or economic perspective but more from some sort of spiritual connection," said Dr Brumm, a principal research fellow at Griffith University.

The findings, published this week by the scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, throws into doubt the belief that hunter-gatherer communities in the Pleistocene (Ice Age) of south-east Asia were less culturally sophisticated than early humans elsewhere.

"For a long time people always thought the origins of modern human creativity - our ability to think symbolically - arose amongst Homo Sapiens in Europe 40,000 years ago," Dr Brumm said.

"Now we are increasingly finding evidence this is not the case and there is evidence of similar sorts of behaviour on the opposite side of the world in south-east Asia."

Dr Brumm even suggests the spiritual relationships with animals in Australian Aboriginal culture could have arisen from the ancestors of Aborigines moving through Wallacea, a group of islands between Asia and Australia, of which Sulawesi is the largest.

"It's a possibility - not something we are pushing too far - but certainly interesting to explore," he said.

Wallacea is one of the most fascinating archipelagoes on earth. It was named after naturalist Alfred Wallace, who noted a difference in animals to the west and east of what is now known as the Wallace Line. The islands west of the line, including Bali, had animals such as apes and tigers, whereas those from Lombok and eastward had marsupials and birds similar to those in Australasia.

The islands of Wallacea were isolated due to deep ocean troughs and have species that are not found anywhere else in the world, including babirusas and bear cuscuses (Ailurops ursinus), a marsupial that looks like a possum.

The archaeological team found artefacts - dated to between 22,000 and 30,000 years old - made from the bones and teeth of both of these animals.

Dr Brumm said "another really cool thing about this discovery" was the evidence that modern humans leaving continental Asia and spreading east through Wallacea had made symbolic jewellery from all these amazing new animals that they found.

"People discovered animals, such as marsupials, that no one even imagined existed before," he said.

However, unlike the woolly mammoths depicted by European cave artists, bear cuscuses and babirusas still exist.

Archaeologist Budianto Hakim said the Makassar Archaeology Agency had been working with Wollongong and Griffith universities since 2010.

In 2014 a team rewrote the history of art when they discovered a cave painting of a babirusa in Leang Timpuseng in Sulawesi was at least 40,000 years old, rivalling a red disk painted in Spain's El Castillo cave, which was previously thought to be the world's oldest known cave art.

The Ice Age jewellery, now in Australia for analysis, will be returned to Indonesia where Mr Budianto said it would eventually be exhibited.

Mr Budianto said another joint dig would take place after the Muslim holiday of Lebaran, which this year falls in late June.

"Indonesia contributes some 50 per cent of ancient human fossils to the world so no wonder Indonesia becomes the target of foreign archaeological research," he said.

Asked if he thought the team would this time find an ancient human fossil, Mr Budianto said: "It may be possible. This is the big question for researchers who come to Sulawesi."

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