Ice Age Art at British Museum: Exhibit to Feature 10,000 to 40,000-Year-Old Works

The British Museum will host an exhibit, beginning on Thursday, that includes the oldest known figurative art in the world, the Associated Press reported.

The exhibit, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Human Mind, features some artworks so old that they are carved from wooly mammoth tusks. But even more surprising than their age is the level of artistry, according to AP. In fact, some of the carvings, sculptures and drawings look like a Pablo Picasso or Henry Moore artwork.

And that's the purpose of the exhibit - to help visitors realize that even though we may not know how our distant ancestors communicated or what they believed, we do know that they thought like us, AP reported.

"They are fully modern humans," Jill Cook, the museum's curator of Paleolithic exhibitions, told AP. "What these works of art show is that they have a visual brain capable of imagination and creativity.

"They really are us," she added. "They are our ancestors."

The museum gathered these works, made between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, made from bones, tusks, antlers, rocks and clay - depicting animals like mammoths, bison, lions and wolverines - which are now extinct, AP reported.

Despite this, though, they are easily recognizable. The artists made use of perspective and scale and abstraction - and worked to capture movement, according to AP. The works are displayed alongside modern artworks, including that of Henry Moore and Henri Matisse.

Cook told the Associated Press that the modern artwork is there to assure visitors that they are looking an art exhibit - not just an artifact showing. "You can look at them without being intimidated," she said to AP.

Besides just looking alike, there is also a factual connection between the ancient works and the modern art. Picasso is an example -- he drew inspiration from a 21,000-year-old ivory sculpture of a naked woman found in southwestern France in 1922, AP reported.

One of the works featured in the exhibit is called the Lion Man, which Nazi-sponsored excavators discovered shattered in the back of a cave in southwest Germany, The Telegraph reported. Three decades later, when archaeologists finally fitted the shards of tusk back together, they realized the piece may have been the oldest existing sculpture, according to The Telegraph. The figure stands upright on two legs, and is a merger of a human body with a lion's head. Cook praises the work for its "remarkable artistry and craftsmanship."

"This stuff shouldn't be shut away behind an iron curtain marked 'prehistory,'" Cook told The Telegraph. "It is part of the deep history of art, part of us."