THE LONG GAIN

On Wednesday of this week I joined an online audience for a talk from Jill Cook, the British Museum’s acting Keeper of the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory.  It was in part trailing a forthcoming exhibition in Bradford, ‘Ice Age Art Now’* and in part recapitulating the British Museum’s seminal 2013 exhibition, ‘Ice Age art: Arrival of the modern mind.'

But don’t get the wrong idea.

As Cook presented it, this is the story of a journey, and an epic fight for survival, the survival of our species, spanning twelve thousand years across arguably the most hostile environment this planet has ever subjected us to. In my imagination (cue a great cinematographer and film score composer) their story is almost akin to the hapless settlers scrambling their way through the perils of the Oregon trail in the MTV series 1883. But to the power of ten.

The journey starts around 24,000 years ago.  This was around the peak of something called the Last Glacial Maximum, the period in the Earth’s history which saw the greatest percentage of the planet covered in ice. But the extreme cold wasn’t the biggest problem facing our fur-clad forebears.  Those country-wide sheets of ice locked in water big time, leading to massive drops in sea level, a major expansion of deserts, and around 20 to 25 times more dust in the atmosphere compared to today’s levels -probably the result of the widespread destruction of vegetation, the dramatic reduction in rainfall (up to 90% in some places) and the glaciers’ supercharged winds. And of course, with the widespread obliteration of vegetation, the great herds of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, bison and reindeer that once filled the larders of our Ice Age ancestors also dwindled dramatically.**

And yet, with populations decimated and half-starved in this freezing dust-bowl, our ancestors still managed to produce amazing works of art. Clustered together in the most hospitable pockets of land (referred to as refugia, we were all refugees once) they mainly produced small sculptures in bone or ivory, exquisitely carved with precision-knapped flint tools by the flickering light of animal-fat lamps. Some of these works were (almost certainly) produced for purely aesthetic reasons, art-for-arts sake, while others decorated (and possibly personalised/branded) tools such as spear-throwers. But the subject matter remained (almost) constant, depicting vivid representations of the animals on which they were totally dependent.

Then, as the ice retreated, our ancestors, and their art advanced.  In many areas, the small sculpted objects gave way to a proliferation of cave paintings.  And while the earliest of these can be dated back to long before the Last Glacial Maximum, from around 20,000 to 17,000 years ago we see the flourishing of the format that resulted in the magnificent cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. These works may well have served some kind of educational purpose (the original whiteboard) and maybe contained a vital calendar of the seasons (according to one recent theory) but I defy anyone to not see the pure artistic genius at work in these wonderfully animated (and possibly cinematically animated in the flickering light of the cave lamps) representations.

While I was trekking across the central European tundra with my ancestors, back in Westminster the chancellor was making her Spring Statement.  She too had the unenviable task of trudging through extremely difficult terrain, but not once in the 4,122 words in the official government transcript of her speech (extracted from a veritable woolly mammoth of ‘political content redacted’) does she mention ‘the arts’, ‘culture’, ‘live entertainment’, ‘theatre’, ‘cinema’, ‘TV’, ‘music’, ‘dance’, ‘opera’, ‘comedy’ …or any other component of the UK’s hugely successful (£125bn) creative economy.  No, I didn’t believe it either. So I did a word search and …zilch.*** And while many of the words the chancellor did use, such as ‘defence,’ ‘housing’ and ‘technology’ might well have resonated with a Palaeolithic audience (no, not The House of Lords) I can’t help thinking that our ancestors would have been as astonished as I was by the total absence of any mention, whatsoever, of one of the defining characteristics of our species.  And the stuff which (alongside the ability to make fire) kept us going through 12 thousand years of the most punishing, and perilous, chapter in the Human Story

DT

28 March 2024

*Ice Age Art Now, 21 June-14 September 2025 Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley, Bradford

**It is believed that around 65% of the megafauna were wiped out during the LGM.

***Although not directly referenced in Reeves’ speech, the DCMS will face cuts along with other government departments