Why lambda/closures expressions came so late to C++?

I was reading a really great Bjarne Stroustrup's article where he exposes some C++ myths. I look at code that focus my attention, because I wouldn't know that C++ supports this kind of expressions. I'm talking about lambda expressions, or closures.

void do_my_sort(vector<double>& v)
{
  sort(v,[](double x, double y) { return x>y; });  // sort v in decreasing order
}

I was working with C# and JavaScript for several years, more recently with Java and Objective C and I find this language feature very powerful and useful. I currently doing some works in Smalltalk and, no surprise... the closures are there too...

So I was wondering, why this language feature came so late to C++ (2011)?