Ice Age Art at the British Museum: 'Not even Leonardo surpassed this'

[The Guardian]    Ice Age Art is subtitled Arrival of the Modern Mind. Its thesis is that 40,000 years ago, when humans migrated from Africa into a comparatively temperate Europe, and were then caught for thousands of years amid the freezing temperatures and furry beasts of the last great freeze, something miraculous happened. Art appeared: art so sophisticated, it proves that the cognitive faculties we value so highly today were fully evolved tens of thousands of years ago (the works here were made between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago). Only a modern human mind, the argument goes, could create a masterpiece like the Zaraysk bison (it is named after the town near Moscow where it was discovered).