"The discovery pushes back the time that modern humans first showed the capacity for creative thought."
Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries.
In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is about 1). But you should also be taking into account all the discoveries of art which aren't records. This matters especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40 pieces of paleolithic art [2].
A better model would take into account that older stuff is less likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if anyone has done this.
It's commonly observed in anthropology that we keep pushing back the dates for all sorts of technologies as the methods improve and more cave sources are found.
I was listening to a podcast about Native American history once and it just hit me: of course we think all the early advanced civilizations were in Egypt, Greece, etc. It's because they built with stone in arid regions.
North American native civilizations had trade, roads, writing, libraries, complex systems of law and jurisprudence, etc., but they built with the materials that were most abundant to them: wood, animal hides, bone, etc. Wood is an amazingly versatile material so if you have a lot of it there's no incentive to develop advanced stone construction or even a lot of metallurgy. The only exception would be civilizations like the Maya and Aztec that appeared to have monument cults, but not all advanced civilizations have monument cults.
Wood degrades over time though, and things like writing don't last anywhere near as long in a wet humid climate.
There could easily have been incredible works of literature and philosophy in all kinds of places in ancient human history. They're just gone.
I worry sometimes about our own civilization making everything digital. One mega solar flare and our collective cultural memory is as gone as the Iroquois writings on animal hides. Future civilizations will know nothing of ceiling cat.
I think the large earth monuments were part of successful agricultural projects. The stone work was to keep the cultural organized and focused. The most successful left large stone constructions.
Dubai is far more architecturally impressive than London, New York, or Los Angeles. Now compare their city GDPs. That was kind of my point.
Some degree of excess wealth is clearly a necessary condition for large scale stone monument construction, but the inverse doesn't hold. A society could have a lot of excess wealth and lack any cult, state mandate, or other construct to drive stone monument building.
That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.
Wouldn’t it make just as much sense that once a site reaches X age it will likely make it to 10X since the conditions that allowed it to get to X are slow to change?
Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries.
In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is about 1). But you should also be taking into account all the discoveries of art which aren't records. This matters especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40 pieces of paleolithic art [2].
A better model would take into account that older stuff is less likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if anyone has done this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art