By comparing the ratio of uranium to thorium in the thin layers on top of the cave art, researchers were able to calculate the age of the paintings Posted on 10/04/2008 6:50:29 PM PDT by BGHater
It may have taken Michelangelo four long years to paint his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,but his earliest predecessors spent considerably longer perfecting their own masterpieces.
Scientists have discovered that prehistoric cave paintings took up to 20,000 years to complete.
Rather than being created in one session, as archaeologists previously thought, many of the works discovered across Europe were produced over hundreds of generations who added to, refreshed and painted over the original pieces of art.
Until now it has been extremely difficult to pinpoint when prehistoric cave paintings and carvings were created, but a pioneering technique is allowing researchers to date cave art accurately for the first time and show how the works were crafted over thousands of years.
Experts now hope the technique will help provide a valuable insight into how early human culture developed and changed as the first modern humans moved across Europe around 40,000 years ago.
By comparing the ratio of uranium to thorium in the thin layers on top of the cave art, researchers were able to calculate the age of the paintings
Dr Pike and his team were able to date the paintings using a technique known as uranium series dating
Bison on the ceiling of the polychrome chamber in the Altamira cave in northern Spain
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Ping.
SC, they are making you and the Post Office look bad with their speed.
Lol. Get out of the tub.
jk
oh come on
That’s some slow drying paint they were using.
/johnny
Well, it’s not like they had a publication deadline, or anything.
ya.. them cave painters were unionized. rofl
come on. this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. 20,000 years to work on a painting? something is wrong.
I think the new technique has flaws. Do they suppose each generation told the next to add one more stroke to the painting?
This doesn’t have the smell of truth about it. Uranium series dating usually applies to times much further back than European cave dwellers. I’d like to see something more solid on the dating techniques they used.
Dang. Democrats in the Stone Age? Who would think they would have survived?
Gotta love persistence.
“Prehistoric cave paintings took up to 20,000 years to complete”
This is just a story to make Illinois road construction schedules palatable.
It sounds like a government project.
How this gig works...
I present an hypothesis...and get a grant...a nice grant that'll fund me for a couple of years.
Then my buddy proposes a different hypothosis...and he gets a grant...a nice grant.
Me and my buddy meet every morning for coffee. We toast to: It's a great life because no one really, really gives a damn about the cave paintings...They're simply cooool.
No, that would be silly.
More likely they improved on previous paintings through overpainting and rejuvenation. That's why you have multiple layers dating to different times.
You put down your brush in a dark cave and you can’t find it again.
I think that the authors must have been journalism majors.
I bet what the scientists are saying is that the paintings were worked on continuously for 20,000 years.
I suspect that they were changed, refreshed, added to, subtracted from and just generally monkeyed with as the local peoples went about there lives and recorded their world on those walls for 200 centuries.
It may have been a ritualistic thing that each generation worked on. It would be interesting to see how much change there was over that length of time.
I bet what the scientists are saying is that the paintings were worked on continuously for 20,000 years.
yes and that still doesn’t make much sense. 20,000 years is an extremely long time to work on one painting in a cave.
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