The iceman cometh

Abstract

When I was a medical student learning obstetrics, I began to see babies in a new way. I realised that these bright little creatures arrived in the world equipped for whatever age they found themselves in. Their brains were able to adapt equally well to life in a cave or a castle. Birth was as much a connection with humanity's past as with its future. As it turned out, the life of an obstetrician was not for me, and I became a psychiatrist instead. Whatever the career choice of the individual physician, however, he or she will find much to enjoy at the British Museum's Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. The exhibition sets out to chart the range of sculpture and drawing by human beings who lived 40 000–10 000 years ago. These objects—carved from stone or tusk, yet more precious in their way than any jewels—are displayed alongside works by modern artists such as Henri Matisse and Henry Moore. This approach yields mixed results. The juxtaposition confirms that the human mind has always been interested in, and capable of representing, the subjective truth of experience, rather than simply producing a slavish copy of reality. But the impact of the Ice Age artists' work is so strong that it needs no accompanying modern pieces to convince me that its creators were indeed people just like us. Another minor complaint is that the labelling on some of the cases verges at times towards neurobabble rather than neuroscience. An image of a female carved onto a mammoth tusk “looks modern because it is the product of a modern brain in which the cells that respond to line orientation have evolved to construct complex illustrations from them”. It is hard to see what this adds: surely since we know the artist had a brain like ours, it follows that he or she processed images in the same way. Perhaps it is best to let the works speak for themselves—and they do this admirably. As might be expected from a culture in which childbirth was highly valuable and perilous, the pregnant female form is strongly represented. In one sculpture, the mother's hands rest on her rounded belly—a symbol of hope and the protective instinct that is immensely touching. In another cabinet is an articulated doll of a male figure: the label speculates that it belonged to “a puppeteer, a shaman, or even an outcast”. I wondered if it might even have belonged to the Ice Age equivalent of a physician—the cave version of the articulated skeleton hanging in the doctor's office. This room for speculation is one of the joys of this exhibition. The biggest question, of course, is what these pieces were for—the fact that some have been deliberately smashed suggests some ritual design, now unintelligible. In some cases, our ancestors' record of the world around them has served a purpose that they could never have predicted. An engraving of a mammoth found in the Dordogne in 1864, for example, provided scientific evidence of the coexistence of man with these now extinct beasts. These fragile messages sent from unknown artists inform our modern understanding of the world and our place in it. This fine exhibition is one of the best I have seen at the British Museum. It reinforces the institution's philosophy that the physical object holds a power to connect us with the past, and to let us glimpse the world through another's eyes. The show ends in a darkened room with curved walls, onto which cave paintings are projected. Thinking of the unnamed human beings whose creations I had just seen, I was reminded of Orson Welles' meditation on the nature of art in the documentary F for Fake: “Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash—the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures, and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. ‘Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.’”