World’s oldest cave paintings?

UPDATE: Here's the NY Times feature on the cave art & is better and more comprehensive then the original article below – With Science, New Portrait of the Cave Artist

This is cool. It's a short article, so hit the link (the Neanderthals have gotten a bad press in the last few years!).

Spanish cave paintings shown as oldest in world

New tests show that crude Spanish cave paintings of a red sphere and handprints are the oldest in the world, so ancient they may not have been by modern man.

Some scientists say they might have even been made by the much-maligned Neanderthals, but others disagree.

Testing the coating of paintings in 11 Spanish caves, researchers found that one is at least 40,800 years old, which is at least 15,000 years older than previously thought. That makes them older than the more famous French cave paintings by thousands of years.