These faces from the ice age give the lie to our idea of civilisation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/faces-from-ice-age-our-idea-civilisation

Version 0 of 1.

On a grassy plateau high above Derwentwater in Cumbria stands the stone circle of Castlerigg. It offers a panorama of the Lake District that stretches up to Borrowdale and across to the Catbells ridge, with the giants of Skiddaw and Helvellyn lofty to the east. All around are peaks, valleys, mists and spirits of the place. I doubt if anywhere in England has a more exhilarating outlook.

Who were the people who manhandled at least 38 10-tonne rocks into a circle on this spot, and why? Was it just to tell the date or propitiate some mountain deity? The longer I stand there, the more baffling the question seems. But of one thing I am sure. Whoever made this place must have felt its beauty and desired to respect it.

We Britons can trace our own culture back over two millennia, through place names, maps, writings, lists of kings and queens. We can laugh with Chaucer, refurbish Dover Castle and reinvent Richard III. But go back 5,000 years to Castlerigg and a great curtain descends. The record is impenetrable. The stones hint at a people who travelled, congregated, settled and built, but they are a people unknown.

Every now and then archaeology steps forward and offers us a teasing, tantalising glimpse of this prehistory. One such is this week's British Museum exhibition of ice age art. It is of 130 objects from the earliest days of human occupation of Europe, never before presented in this way.

It is a difficult show. Visitors should not be deceived by blown-up publicity images of mis-shapen ladies. All the objects are minuscule. They remind me of the "insect safaris" of Africa's Skeleton Coast, conducted on hands and knees with magnifying glasses. The eye and brain take time to adjust to the tunnel vision of a microscopic world. Yet once adjusted, a wonderland reveals itself.

There are no magnifying glasses at the British Museum, but with time the wonder grows. The animals are astonishingly realistic: horses, bison, lions, deer, carved from mammoth tusks with stone tools. A bison strides towards us, mouth half-open; a reindeer swims a stream. Like the mural horses in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, the sculptor's eye is attuned to expressing life as something static and lasting, to freezing movement and expressing fear and eagerness in an animal's face.

The humans are less realistic but more puzzling. Most are women, pregnant or with bulbous breasts and prominent genitalia. Their implausible shape has led them to be identified as fertility emblems or goddesses. But this is not true of all of them. The "Mona Lisa" of Moravia, the earliest known sculpted head, has the eeriest of faces, distorted, poignantly realistic. The braided head of a mouthless girl is exquisite. The "Venus de Lespugue" that so fascinated Picasso is a mysterious, semi-abstract fantasy.

The message of this show is clear – never presume what you do not know, just wonder at what you can imagine. Which is why it is odd that the museum feels obliged to hit visitors over the head with a plodding parallel, dotting among it works by Picasso, Matisse and others, inspired by the "primitive" art show of late 19th-century Paris. This makes the modern works seem hard and clumsy, and breaks the spell of smallness of the pre-historic ones.

I ended craving more. Surely out there in the caves of France and Spain or the plains of middle Europe there must be thousands more such treasures. And what of their context? Science is helping archaeology reveal glimpses, but only glimpses. The story of Stonehenge broadens with the geology of the Preseli hills, the dentistry of the "Avebury archer" and the chemistry of the blue-stone fragments. Excavation in Egypt's artisans' village reveals an understanding of the Valley of the Kings. Carbon dating charts the arrival of cities in India, writing in Mesopotamia and megaliths in Britain. We are beginning to develop plausible "histories" of some of these happenings.

This was a mere four or five millennia ago, the so-called dawn of civilisation. The ice age was three, four, even five times earlier. Its artefacts were made by humans now known to have shared Europe with surviving Neanderthals. Their hunter-gatherer lives were technologically primitive, with fire but no metal and only animal skins to keep the cold at bay. Once it was thought that the pre-frontal cortex of their brain was unformed for social organisation.

This show gives the lie to that. We enter a world of painters and sculptors who must have produced many such objects in complex communities able to support such workers. They fashioned their tools, mixed their paints, sculpted their reliefs, erected their scaffolds for cave murals, much as they might today. There is even evidence of "apprentices". As the exhibition's curator, Jill Cook, remarks, these were people "capable of imagining, thinking, reasoning and communicating in words, pictures, symbols and music … the brain functioning then as it does now."

This takes me no nearer the architects of Castlerigg, except in humility. Try as we may, we cannot penetrate the membrane of silence that divides us from such distant ancestors. But we have their faces, and they tell us one thing beyond doubt. They gaze out across the immensity of time with a common humanity that is utterly startling. They vindicate John Berger's oft-quoted remark, that the compulsion to art is born in human beings "like a foal that can walk straight away". We cannot escape it, and never have.

Michael Gove, now master of the U-turn, has belatedly conceded art a place in his curriculum. It is good to see him joining the ice age.