Archaeologists working in Russia’s Ural Mountains have uncovered a Paleolithic painting of a two-humped camel they believe could be up to 40,000 years old and may hold the secrets to early human migratory patterns.

The image of the red ocher camel outlined with black charcoal startled experts because the painting in the Kapova mountain cave lies so far from places where stone age peoples could have seen the animals, Moscow State University said in a press release. 

Uranium-based dating techniques have established that the camel rock art was created by an artist no earlier than 37,700 years ago and no later than 14,500 years ago, a time when there were no camels in the southern Urals. As such, the discovery has confirmed research that suggests people living up to 50,000 years ago migrated vast distances, as far away as France and Spain.