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Comment by java-man | Hacker News Reader

It might still be too early to know the age of the drawings (the article estimates "at least 24,000 years old"), but I couldn't help noticing that these drawings are much simpler than much older art in the Chauvet cave (dated to around 30-35 thousand years old) [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

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If I were to draw animals in a cave wall today, they would be even more crude.

These paintings were made by individual people and each had different artistic ability. How long ago they were painted may not correlate directly with how intricate they are.

Seems like there's very little of the drawings left, it might have lost some detail over time.

I wonder if anything can be done to sense what they used to look like, maybe by scanning for places where residue of clay fell off or was covered over like they mentioned.

There is a huge overlap between the later Paleolithic stone industries on the order of tens of thousands of years so it’s safe to assume there was also a significant variation in artistic ability between tribes.

It makes sense to me because the article says that they used fingers and clay to make the drawings. The Chauvet cave is regarded as fairly unique in that outlines were scratched out and the cave wall itself was cleared out before starting the artwork.

Not always - many paintings were probably made with fingers using a very advanced technique (shading), see for example, the bear [0].

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fate-of-the-cave-bear...

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