11,000 year old paintings and adobe walls are all the more remarkable because permanent dwellings imply permanent settlement patters. All this was going on during the end of the last Ice Age, while enormous parts of North America and elsewhere were still covered by continental ice sheets and the last of the Ice Age animals so familiar to everyone were still alive.Talk about global climate change! Sealevels were depressed 100 meters (320 feet!) and rose rapidly as all that ice melted and the interglacial began. Lad that had been exposed and served as habitats for game animals and also routes for migration of animals and humans were rapidly drowned. All this current climate change talk, mostly silly science from retired politicians, where not one inch of coast has been lost by ddrowning events, highlights the need for more education (and rationalit). Indeed those adobe walls with paintings speak volumes about the complexity of history.

Obviously they are far younger than the Lascaux wall paintings: I had to read the story to see that they mean the oldest paintings on a wall constructed by man.

I suspect that in this case the adobe wall is about as important as the paintings. The technology for both is of interest. Making adobes, including gathering the materials in a formulaic way and having mlds for uniformity, as well as the sense of structural form, etc., speaks to tradition, knowledge base that is passed alone, stability, etc. The painting materials including color pigments as well as preparing the wall for painting, adds to the complexity. This is a very different expression than the cave paintings, one must conclude.

Even with the damage and the fading, it is pretty clear that this is a logical, repeated pattern - with almost mathematical precision. A much more sophisticated pattern than most modern wallpaper. To call this abstract, or reminscient of Paul Klee, does not do it justice.

Note the large trianglular motifs, with the red ones meeting the black ones at the right angles (also thereby definign two white triangles each). This element can be seen at least 3 times, with hints of at least two others. Meanwhile, the stair-step 'hypotenuse' of the colored triangles is always displaced from the parallel hypotenuse of the white triangles by a checkerboard of alternating white and the opposite color.

--Mike Palmer, Stillwater, Oklahoma

I think the term "modern" is being thrown in incorrectly. Just because something resembles modern art, does not make it so.

I like Mike Palmer's analysis of the wall paintings.

I think these paintings prove that we cannot assume that we know everything about the history of mankind and how advanced previous societies were.