Are The Chauvet Cave Paintings really 30,000 years old. ?

I think they go by carbon dating. The thing with European art in the National Gallery and every other institution is that they are products of the Christian era. And 'art' in the realistic sense had basically died. The Greeks and Romans were quite capable of realistic interpretation, but image-making took a back seat once we became Christian. The Chinese and Japanese were producing wonderful art in their own Eastern way at the same time. It wasn't until Humanism arose, along with the revival of studies of Greek and Roman texts and art, that perspective and study of the human figure (especially) started up again.