Exhibition review: Ice Age art - Arrival of the Modern Mind,
British Museum, London, until May 26 2013 40,000 years ago our
Ice Age ancestors, the hunter gatherers, weren’t making pots and
pans, they were making weapons and art. © On loan from Moravske
Zemske Museum. Brno This fact may have you pondering how far we
have come during the past few millennia. But the British
Museum’s exhibition of their sculpture, ceramics, drawing and
ornament will also have you contemplating their bewildering
creativity and skill - as well as the baffling complexities of
the human brain. Take one of the central pieces, Lion Man, a
40,000-year-old statuette uncovered from the Hohlenstein-Sadel
Cave in Germany in 1939. Carved from a single piece of bone. it
tells us as much about the capability to imagine – and the
development of neurons, synapses and the prefontal cortex – as
it does about the beliefs of the person who made it. It is
presented here primarily as an artwork rather than a piece of
archaeology together with an aston