A Bunch of Artists Working with Uranium Based Media Have All Died.

[NNadir]

2. Well then, the ancient curators lived 40,000 years ago. One wonders...

...the ancient security people kept ancient visitors from getting too close to the paintings.

The whole time I was reading this paper, I wondered to myself how much damage was done to the paintings by the analysis. It does seem that the authors were very, very careful though.

The free supplementary info has quite a bit of information by the way.

Here's a nice graphic from the paper's body refering to the layering in the sample:



The caption:

Samples LSR1 and LSR2 are shown. a, b, Photograph (a) and tracing (b) showing the locations of the dated speleothems (n?=?2) and associated mulberry-coloured hand stencils and human figure. The small anthropomorph is superimposed over a hand stencil in mulberry-coloured pigment. It appears to be wearing a large headdress and holding a spear. c, Profiles of the speleothem showing the micro-excavated subsamples and associated U-series dates. Tracing, L. Huntley.

The disequilibrium observed actually derives from the "spelothems" which is the carbonate deposits formed over the paintings themselves over the millennia.