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A painting on a cave wall has survived for forty thousand years. Think of everything it has outlasted. The rise and fall of every empire. The end of the Ice Age. The invention of writing, the wheel, the city. Through all of it, the image endured on its rock, untouched, waiting. Then, in a single careless moment, a visitor reaches out and runs a hand across it. Or wets it to brighten the colours for a photograph. Or sets off a camera flash, again and again. What forty thousand

Press your palm against a cave wall where, thirty thousand years ago, someone pressed theirs. Look at the animal they painted, the symbol they carved, the handprint they left in pigment. Then ask the question that has no certain answer. Why did you do this? It is the most natural question in the world, and the hardest. We can see the art. We can date it, measure it, map it. We can stand exactly where the artist stood. The one thing we cannot do is ask them what it meant. The

A painting on a cave wall carries no signature. No date. No note from the artist saying when the work was done. It is simply there, on the rock, silent. So how can anyone possibly say it is forty thousand years old? Or fifty thousand? How do you put a number on an image left by a person who vanished into the deep past without a single written word? It sounds impossible. For a long time, it very nearly was. The dating of rock art is among the hardest challenges in all of archa