Around 13,500 years ago, human hands gently grasped a slender piece of bone. It was the rib of a wild horse – an unmistakeably familiar animal to the hunter-gatherer groups who followed migrating herds across the wide plains that once connected Britain to Continental Europe – and it was just such an animal that this particular individual had decided to draw. The bone had been carefully prepared, scraped clean and smooth with a stone tool, and across its surface the anonymous artist deftly wielded a burin – a small stone blade with a nib-like point – to incise the outline of a galloping horse. Although a static image, its fine lines capture a powerful sense of motion, showing the animal in profile with its head thrust forward and a short mane bristling along its outstretched neck. Eyes and nostrils are delicately drawn, while the sharp angle of the horse’s jaw, the softer, sensitive flesh of its muzzle, and the powerful muscles of its shoulder are captured in keenly observed detail. Despite the skill evident in its execution, however, at some later point the image was deliberately defaced, with heavy, horizontal lines scored across the horse’s back, and the rib itself snapped in two.
The surviving portion, measuring just 7.3cm (2.9 inches) long, was rediscovered in 1876 in what today is called Robin Hood Cave, part of Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge running along the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border. Across the millennia, it offers a fleeting glimpse into the imagination of an individual who lived during a period of profound change: the dying days of the last Ice Age, when receding glaciers and a gradually improving climate allowed humans to re-establish themselves in areas of Europe that had long been inhospitably frozen – including, eventually, Britain. But, while the position of these prehistoric pioneers must have felt precarious, this was not a constant struggle for subsistence.
As well as the stone tools essential to their everyday activities, communities had the space, the mental energy and, crucially, the downtime to create items and images that offered no functional benefit to their odds of survival. Detailed drawings on stone and bone; skilfully sculpted pieces of antler and ivory; jewellery fashioned from animal teeth and shells; and, most famously, vibrant cave paintings at sites like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. None of these creations would have kept people warm or put food in their bellies – but they were clearly important enough to merit time and resources that could have been put to more practical uses. Perhaps this ancient imagery was a way of forging social bonds and expressing identities. Then, as now, art contributed to people’s psychological and emotional wellbeing, helping to establish the strong relationships essential to sustaining their ways of life.
Ancient DNA and ‘Anglo-Frisians’