"Described as ‘exquisitely rendered’, the paintings on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France upset evolutionary theories about human artistic expression when they were discovered in 1994. That’s because the paintings were carbon-dated as being around 30,000 years old—whereas archaeologists held that ‘such sophisticated artworks did not appear until up to 15,000 years later’.
Many archaeologists have altered their views accordingly—for
But some archaeologists continue to reject the claimed dates vigorously. Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield, UK, in a recent paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, said that the Chauvet drawings are simply too magnificent for their time. He insists that the dates are unreliable.
Actually, we would say that Tosello and Pettitt are both right—and both wrong. Tosello is right about man’s artistic expression having been ‘there from the beginning’. And Pettitt is right about the carbon dates being wrong.
The cave paintings can be no older than the global Flood, which occurred only around 4,500 years ago, and in fact are likely to be much younger than that."
CMI
