It's worth remembering in the case of discoveries like this that the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice.<p>Unfortunately, there has been relatively little statistical work done to use distributions of preserved ages to infer the age of origin, and although I recall reading an article in Nature on the problem in the '80's or early '90's it would seem that most of the people working in the field have not really focused on this problem, and instead continue to apply a mixture of "The practice began around the time of the earliest preserved instance of it" and "The practice began earlier by some amount that I will estimate from my gut".<p>Neither of these is approaches is methodologically sound, and both tend to underestimate the ultimate age of a given practice (or species, in the case of fossils) and tend to underestimate the error bars as well.
I am reminded of Steely Dan's "The Caves of Altamira" (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9VCuAbRxc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9VCuAbRxc</a>), a meditation on cave paintings, and other artifacts of the human drive to create visual art, such as movies, that are shown on the walls of a darkened chamber, for our delight.
As always, Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is topical: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams</a><p>I showed it to a couple of my friends and every one of them fell asleep. I liked it though, and it gives you an interesting look into the modern day behind-the-scenes work these immensely valuable discoveries bring forth.
The "Interactive Video" on this page is hilariously ill conceived. Once you click a link to start another video you can't jump back to the original video and you end up playing two videos at the same time. The presenter says "Click here" but the "link" is already gone before you can even move your mouse.
Can you imagine standing next to "one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one?"<p>The philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of certain artworks having "aura." That one practically glows.