Ice Age Art Now

This illustrated book demonstrates how artistic creativity existed thousands of years before traditional art histories suggest, as an essential part of human life. It presents extraordinary drawn and sculpted images from the final 20,000 years of the last Ice Age in the British Museum’s collection. These astounding works, some dating back to around 23,000 years ago, reveal the deep roots of drawing, sculpture and modelling in the era of the great painted caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. This period may be described as a renaissance in the applied and fine arts of people who had narrowly avoided extinction in the harsh cold of the Last Glacial Maximum, who then asserted their ways of life through art.