A 2-m- (6.6-foot) long painting of a kangaroo in a rock shelter in the north-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia is dated to between 17,500 and 17,100 years on the basis of the ages of three overlying and three underlying wasp nests.
Unfortunately, radiometric dating techniques are only rarely applicable to older rock art, so the age of this aspect of human creative expression is not as well constrained.
With rare exceptions — for example, in France, where charcoal pigmented art is preserved in deep caves — the remaining pigment in paintings from the Pleistocene period (older than around 11,500 years) contains no materials that can be dated directly.
In the new research, University of Melbourne’s Dr. Damien Finch and colleagues relied on the fortuitous occurrence of dateable mud wasp nests overlying or underlying rock art to provide minimum or maximum age limits for individual motifs in eight separate sandstone rock shelters in the Australian Kimberley region.
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/aus ... 09381.html