Animal carving

About 40,000 years ago, early human creativity achieved a new dimension with the manufacture of the first sculptures and pictorial works. While the Neanderthals never developed any form of visual art, people now decorated cave walls and cut small figures out of bones and ivory. These representations expressed an early form of religion, centred on hunting magic, totemism, and the veneration of a mother or fertility goddess. Both realistic and abstract representations appeared, with Ice Age animals as the commonest subjects. Images of humans, and these were predominantly of women, appear more rarely. The cave paintings are particularly fascinating due to their almost expressionist style. Even animal representations chiselled into stone, partly overlapping each other, or minor works of art capture the characteristic features of their various subjects with surprising accuracy. Examples of this can be seen on the stone taken from the Laugerie Basse cave, and the fragment of rib with a small horse’s head carved on it from La Roche in Lalinde.