Maybe in another 30k years, we'll be looking at the defacement as an amazing piece of art that tells the story of the current social climate at this point in time, or something along those lines.
Yes, it IS that big of a deal. Anything 30K years old made by humans is precious beyond measuring. We don't have written words that old. The stock of them is strictly limited and there won't be any more (unless someone discovers one somewhere else, which will be world news).
For more on this fascinating subject: https://mirning.org/
Yes, all things change, and eventually everything will be lost in the eventual heat death of the universe, and all human endeavour will be rendered pointless. But it's still a totally pointless and tragic waste.
It's actually not so clear it was purposeful. If you didn't know there was art there, you would not be able to tell. It's very possible they just wanted to write some nonsense, and didn't realize they were overwriting anything significant.
The art looks like parallel lines made by dragging a hand over the surface, and it covers virtually every bit of the surface. The vandalism is only in a small part.
A more useful reaction is to teach people more history, so they would know about their heritage in the cave.
I’m not saying it was unworthy or worthless, but given the limited amount of resources and grant money to go around, this cave may simply have been neglected in favor of the others.
There's a parellel in the early expeditions to Pompeii or Troy which did a lot to destroy the sites in question and destroyed a lot of knowledge in the process.
edit: corrected a number. Also, I looked at "employed" meaning full time or part time research vs. just having a PhD in it. Like physics PhDs are 58K which sounds about right, just few actually get a faculty position, temporary (post-doc, staff scientist) or otherwise.
As for why I say both, the number of positions tends to also put downward pressure on number of applicants I think and makes it more likely people who study it or consider studying it consider other fields or jobs before even applying.
Whether the vandalism was intentional is not entirely clear yet, but a natural disaster damaging or even destroying something is different from humans intentionally doing so through ignorance or malice.
Or let me put it this way: if some natural disaster destroys your car you'd be bummed out and curse at the world for a minute, and then move on as such things happen. The response would be different if I were to wreck your car with a baseball bat.
Never minding the fact that this is your grandmother we're talking about, can you think of any other reasons why this would be wrong? Can you think of any historical reasons why a 30k old artifact of visual communication might be noteworthy to preserve?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Finger-flutings-in-Koona...
The cave we're talking about here are one of approximately 100,000 Aboriginal art sites scattered around Australia, and best we can tell was abandoned by all, including the Aboriginals who once lived there, for around 19,000 years until rediscovered in 1956. Yes, it would be nice to preserve it and the teenage edgelords who vandalized it should be punished, but their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide.
Do you?
You haven't actually responded to any of the points I've made, you're simply insisting that because "there's a lot" of Aboriginal art sites, vandalizing them is somehow okay or not that big of a deal.
> their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide
Thoughtless destruction is pretty much the exact definition of genocide.
When you get to the point that you feel it necessary to destroy things to advance your cause you've entered down the path of leaving behind your humanity.
If thoughtless destruction is just 'in the eye of the beholder' then the 9/11 bombers were simply wrong from one point of view and there is a world in which they were right to kill thousands of people - after all, the West has committed many crimes, yes?
Or we could say that the Trail of Tears was a smart decision to get productive land into the hands of people who knew what to do with it.
I am with you. Obviously, it would be better if it had not happened from our perspective, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it. Visitors to the caves 30,000 years ago defaced the natural beauty. It is reveled and studied today. The parents or elders might have castigated them for vandalizing sacred grounds or admonished them for wasting time with such worthless endeavors. Today, we do the same.
Banksy largely gets a pass and is celebrated. In 1,000 years or 50, someone might be selling this new imagery on a t-shirt.
I found a fossil upper palate and strange humanoid teeth in Ohio during my teens. Sadly, it is lost forever. Considering it might be a rarity here and possibly significant to science, I wish it had never disappeared. I occasionally lose sleep over that. It meant something to me. That cave art means something to others. I can empathize in that context.