"Wandering through the landscape in small bands, sheltering beneath rocks, drinking from rivers, the earliest humans lived close to the nature that surrounded them. They carried out their lives not as if above animals, but one creature among many.

"And yet there was a difference. With their hands they shaped stones into tools, chipping them with an eye to symmetry. From old fires they took lumps of charcoal to make marks on rough cave walls, and on flat stones held in their hands. Their bodies they decorated with shells from the shore, drawing patterns on their skin with reddish pigments, mixed in empty shells. They left signs of life in the shelters they returned to, season after season, generation after generation.

"Around fifty thousand years ago a small band of humans left their ancestral home, the African continent, to wander through the world. From this moment the earliest known signs of a new human ability survive, perhaps already tens of thousands of years old, but only now making its mark on the world—the ability to create images. With a few strokes of charcoal a deer could appear running across a cave wall. Whittling and carving a length of wood or ivory, a lion could be held captive in the hand.

"It was like a light turning on in the human mind." - John-Paul Stonard

Article: On the Birth of the Art Instinct