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closely, one behind the other, and in positioning them the sculptor has brilliantly exploited the tapering shape of the mammoth tusk. The smaller, female reindeer is in front with the very end of the tusk forming the tip of her nose; and behind her, in the fuller body of the tusk, comes the larger male. Because of the ivory’s curve, both animals are shown with their chins up and their antlers tipped back, exactly as they would be when swimming, and along the undersides their legs are at full stretch, giving a marvellous impression of streamlined movement. It’s a superbly observed piece – and it can only have been made by somebody who has spent a long time watching reindeer swimming across rivers.

So it’s surely not merely through chance that it was found beside a river, in a rock shelter at Montastruc in France. This carving is a beautifully realistic representation of the reindeer which, 13,000 years ago, were roaming in great herds across Europe. The continent at this time was far colder than it is today; most of the landscape consisted of open, treeless plain, rather like the landscape of present-day Siberia. For human hunter-gatherers in this unforgiving terrain, reindeer were one of the most important means of survival. Their meat, skin, bones and antlers could supply pretty well all the food and clothing they needed, as well as the raw materials for tools and weapons. As long as they could hunt reindeer they would survive, and survive comfortably. So it’s not surprising that our artist knew the animals very well, and that he chose to make an image of them.

The larger, male reindeer displays an impressive set of antlers, which run along almost the whole length of his back, and we can sex him quite confidently, as the artist has carved his genitals under his belly. The female has smaller antlers and four little bumps on her underside that look just like teats. But we can be even more specific than this: we’re clearly looking at these animals in the autumn, at the time of rutting and the migration to winter pastures. Only in the autumn do both male and female have full sets of antlers and coats in such wonderful condition. On the female’s chest the ribs and the sternum have been beautifully carved. This object was clearly made not just with the knowledge of a hunter but also with the insight of a butcher, someone who had not only looked at his animals, but had cut them up.

Mammoth carved from a reindeer antler about 12,500 years ago

We know that this detailed naturalism was only one of the styles that Ice Age artists had at their disposal. In the British Museum there is another sculpture found in that same cave at Montastruc. By a happy symmetry, that may not be coincidence: where our reindeer are carved on mammoth tusk, the other sculpture is of a mammoth carved on a reindeer antler. But the mammoth, although instantly recognizable, is drawn in a quite different way – simplified and schematized, somewhere between a caricature and an abstraction. This pairing is no one-off accident: Ice Age artists display a whole range of styles and techniques – abstract, naturalistic, even surreal – as well as using perspective and sophisticated composition. These are modern humans with modern human minds, just like our own. They still live by hunting and gathering, but they are interpreting their world through art. Professor Steven Mithen, of the University of Reading, characterizes the change:

Something happened in the human brain, between say 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, that allowed this fantastic creativity, imagination, artistic ability, to emerge – it was probably that different parts of the brain became connected in a new way, and so could combine different ways of thinking, including what people know about nature and what they know about making things. This gave them a new capacity to produce pieces of art. But Ice Age conditions were critical as well: it was a very challenging time for people living in harsh, long winters – the need to build up really intense social bonds, the need for ritual, the need for religion,