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Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found in Montastruc, France
11000 BC
Around 50,000 years ago something dramatic seems to have happened to the human brain. Across the world, humans started to create patterns that decorate and intrigue, to make jewellery to adorn the body, and to produce representations of the animals that shared their world. They were making objects that were less about physically changing the world than about exploring the order and the patterns that can be seen in it. In short, they were making art. The two reindeer represented on this piece of bone form the oldest artwork in any British gallery or museum. It was made during the end of the latest Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. It is alarmingly delicate: we keep it in a climate-controlled case and hardly ever move it, because with any sudden shock it could just crumble to dust. It’s a sculpture about 20 centimetres (8 inches) long, carved from the tusk of a mammoth – evidently from towards the end of the tusk, because it’s slim and slightly curved. It was made by one of our ancestors who wanted to show his own world to himself, and in doing so he relayed that world with astonishing immediacy to us. It is a masterpiece of Ice Age art, and it’s also evidence of a huge change in the way in which the human brain was working.
The stone tools we looked at previously raised the question of whether it is making things that makes us human. Could you conceive of being human without using objects to negotiate the world? I don’t think I can. But there’s another question that follows quite quickly once you start looking at these very ancient things. Why do all modern humans share the compulsion to make works of art? Why does man the tool-maker everywhere turn into man the artist?
The two reindeer in this artwork swim closely, one behind the other, and in positioning them the sculptor has brilliantly exploited the tapering shape of the mammoth tusk. The smaller, female reindeer is in front with the very end of the tusk forming the tip of her nose; and behind her, in the fuller body of the tusk, comes the larger male. Because of the ivory’s curve, both animals are shown with their chins up and their antlers tipped back, exactly as they would be when swimming, and along the undersides their legs are at full stretch, giving a marvellous impression of streamlined movement. It’s a superbly observed piece – and it can only have been made by somebody who has spent a long time watching reindeer swimming across rivers.
So it’s surely not merely through chance that it was found beside a river, in a rock shelter at Montastruc in France. This carving is a beautifully realistic representation of the reindeer which, 13,000 years ago, were roaming in great herds across Europe. The continent at this time was far colder than it is today; most of the landscape consisted of open, treeless plain, rather like the landscape of present-day Siberia. For human hunter-gatherers in this unforgiving terrain, reindeer were one of the most important means of survival. Their meat, skin, bones and antlers could supply pretty well all the food and clothing they needed, as well as the raw materials for tools and weapons. As long as they could hunt reindeer they would survive, and survive comfortably. So it’s not surprising that our artist knew the animals very well, and that he chose to make an image of them.
The larger, male reindeer displays an impressive set of antlers, which run along almost the whole length of his back, and we can sex him quite confidently, as the artist has carved his genitals under his belly. The female has smaller antlers and four little bumps on her underside that look just like teats. But we can be even more specific than this: we’re clearly looking at these animals in the autumn, at the time of rutting and the migration to winter pastures. Only in the autumn do both male and female have full sets of antlers and coats in such wonderful condition. On the female’s chest the ribs and the sternum have been beautifully carved. This object was clearly made not just with the knowledge of a hunter but also with the insight of a butcher, someone who had not only looked at his animals, but had cut them up.
Mammoth carved from a reindeer antler about 12,500 years ago
We know that this detailed naturalism was only one of the styles that Ice Age artists had at their disposal. In the British Museum there is another sculpture found in that same cave at Montastruc. By a happy symmetry, that may not be coincidence: where our reindeer are carved on mammoth tusk, the other sculpture is of a mammoth carved on a reindeer antler. But the mammoth, although instantly recognizable, is drawn in a quite different way – simplified and schematized, somewhere between a caricature and an abstraction. This pairing is no one-off accident: Ice Age artists display a whole range of styles and techniques – abstract, naturalistic, even surreal – as well as using perspective and sophisticated composition. These are modern humans with modern human minds, just like our own. They still live by hunting and gathering, but they are interpreting their world through art. Professor Steven Mithen, of the University of Reading, characterizes the change:
Something happened in the human brain, between say 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, that allowed this fantastic creativity, imagination, artistic ability, to emerge – it was probably that different parts of the brain became connected in a new way, and so could combine different ways of thinking, including what people know about nature and what they know about making things. This gave them a new capacity to produce pieces of art. But Ice Age conditions were critical as well: it was a very challenging time for people living in harsh, long winters – the need to build up really intense social bonds, the need for ritual, the need for religion, all these related to this flowering of creative art at the time. Part of the art is an overwhelming sense of delight and appreciation and celebration of the natural world.
It is an appreciation not just of the animal world – these people know how to make the most of the rocks and minerals. This little sculpture is the result of four separate stone technologies. First, the tip of the tusk was severed with a chopping tool; then the contours of the animals were whittled with a stone knife and scraper. Then the whole thing was polished using a powdered iron oxide mixed with water, probably buffed up with a chamois leather, and finally the markings on the bodies and the details of the eyes were carefully incised with a stone engraving tool. In execution as well as in conception, this is a very complex work of art. It shows all the qualities of precise observation and skilled execution that you would look for in any great artist.
Why would you go to such trouble to make an object with no practical purpose? Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sees a deep meaning in all this:
You can feel that somebody’s making this who was projecting themselves with huge imaginative generosity into the world around, and saw and felt in their bones that rhythm. In the art of this period you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on around them, in a way which isn’t just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting. I think it’s more than that. It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and that’s actually a very religious impulse, to be at home in the world. We sometimes tend to identify religion with not being at home in the world, as if the real stuff were elsewhere in Heaven; and yet if you look at religious origins, at a lot of the mainstream themes in the great world religions, it’s the other way round – it’s how to live here and now and how to be part of that flow of life.
This carving of the two swimming reindeer had no practical function, only form. Was it an image made just for its beauty? Or does it have a different purpose? By representing something, by making a picture or a sculpture of it, you give it life by a kind of magical power, and you assert your relation to it in a world that you’re able not just to experience, but to imagine.
It may be that much of the art made around the world at the time of the latest Ice Age did indeed have a religious dimension, although we can now only guess at any ritual use. But this art sits in a tradition still very much alive today, an evolving religious consciousness that shapes many human societies. Objects like this sculpture of swimming reindeer take us into the minds and imaginations of people far removed from us, but very like us – into a world that they could not see but that they immediately understood.