Art history recognizes the fact that the discovery of the first Western European prehistoric ornate caves of Altamira (Spain), one hundred years ago, the Lascaux caves in 1940 (France) and the Chauvet one in 1994 (France), gave birth to a period of wonder and questionning about the function of these images, some of which are more than 30 000 years old. Recent research across the 5 continents shows that these figurative and symbolic expressions reminiscent...

Where do we find the world's very first art? When, and why, did people begin experimenting with different materials, forms and colors? Were our once-cousins, the Neanderthals, also capable of creating art? Prehistorians have been asking these questions of our ancestors for decades, but only very recently, with the development of cutting-edge scientific and archaeological techniques, have we been able to piece together the first chapter in the story...