Here are a couple of excepts taken from the June 23rd New Yorker Magazine article, "First Impressions", Letter from Southern France, What does the world's oldest art say about us? by Judith Thurman.
"In that respect, Chauvet (a newly discovered cave*) was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a "classical civilization." for the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes,must have been "deeply satisfying"-and stable to a degree it is hard for us modern humans to imagine."
And this.. "The ceilings of the principal galleries vary in height from five to forty feet, but there are passages or alcoves where an adult has to kneel or crawl. Twenty-six thousand years ago (six millennias after the first paintings were created), a lone adolescent left his footprints and torch swipes int he furthest reaches of the western horn, the Gallery of the Crosshatching."