Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind

Sadly the BM hasn't been able to ship the famous caves at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira to London for this absorbing exhibition, but it has been able to bring together art made from stone, bone, antler and ivory dating back 40,000 years, as well as younger figurative pieces such as ceramic figures and a 23,000-year-old abstract figure in mammoth ivory that so fascinated Picasso he had two copies of it. Curated by Jill Cook as an exhibition of art rather than archeological finds, the show aims to explore how the creation of these pieces demonstrate the arrival and development of the modern brain, one capable of a creativity and expression that have remained surprisingly similar across thousands of years.