Science
Wasps reveal age of Australia’s oldest-known rock paintings – Sydney Morning Herald
Details of how ancient Kimberley rock art was produced and the lives of the people who painted them seemed destined to remain just out of our reach, but then a…
After years of painstaking work, the team part of Australias largest rock art dating project discovered that many of the rock paintings cover or are covered by the nests of mud wasps, jammed into crevices on the rock walls.
Unlike the paintings themselves, the team found these nests can be reliably dated, giving for the first time a high-quality estimate of Australias oldest rock art: between 13,000 and 17,500 years old. The results were published in Nature Human Behaviour on Tuesday.
One of the…
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