Ice Age Art at the British Museum: 'Not even Da Vinci surpassed this' Human bodies in this show are overwhelmingly abstract, while animals are portrayed with gobsmacking accuracy ... an image of a reindeer, carved into a reindeer bone, from Ice Age Art at the British Museum in London I am looking at women with floppy breasts, massive hips and eyeless faces. Their bodies are deeply alien - disturbing in their total lack of what the modern world sees as desirable. Nearby, the British Museum has installed two nudes by Matisse, in one of many attempts in this exhibition to draw parallels between the earliest art and that of our own era. But this comparison just adds to the unease. To put it in language no archaeologist is likely to use: the curves of a Matisse woman are sexy; the bulges and blanknesses of these nudes, carved from ivory in central Europe 30,000 years ago, are not. Then something catches my eye: a sculpture of a bison, created 21,000 years ago. It's so real, so alive, I can almost hear it snort and stamp. It has the same magical presence, the same thrilling realism, as cave paintings I've seen, also dating back to the ice age: images of mammoths, horses, bison. So why did the same artists choose to depict humans with such bizarre abstraction? It is one of the mysteries that make this show so eerie and thought-provoking. 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). But this show isn't just an encounter with the first modern minds. It also reveals how peculiar and mysterious those minds were. Why make art at all? Why shape figures to look like animals and women? The first art created in Europe included portable works like the sculptures and carvings that feature in this show; and cave paintings, which obviously have to stay put. This gives the curators a tricky task: how to show the former and convey the latter, while avoiding a sense of archaeological dustiness. One solution is to juxtapose ancient ivory carvings with modernist works such as a Henry Moore sculpture and a Mondrian drawing. This is sadly misguided. The avant-garde work of the 20th century echoes ice-age art - not to mention African masks and Oceanian statues - because artists like Picasso chose to emulate whatever freed their minds from western realism. These pairings tell us nothing about the ice age and are a distraction. The Venus de Lespugue figure - about 23,000 years old - which so fascinated Picasso. Photograph: Daniel Ponsard The first exhibit here is a sculpture of a woman, carved in ivory with a bulbous, abstract symmetry about 23,000 years ago. She was found in the Rideaux Cave in Lespugue, France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Known as the Venus of Lespugue, she fascinated Picasso; his two replicas can be seen in a photograph next to this exquisite carving. But what does the fact that Picasso loved this sculpture reveal about ice-age art? About as much as his use of African masks tells us about the societies that produced them. It feels like crowd-pleasing: the presence of modern art reassures us we are looking at a cool and current exhibition - not just some highbrow, nerdy delve into the ancient. Heaven forbid we should be asked to think ourselves outside our own cultural bubble. Unlike Matisse, Moore, Mondrian and Picasso, the creators of ice-age art belonged to a world where people hunted to stay alive; they portrayed animals that are now extinct; and they lived in a world without cities, writing or agriculture. These ice-age humans may have been like us biologically, but they had ideas we can only guess at. The women they carved in ivory, and even moulded from clay in the Danube Valley, are utterly enigmatic. Could they be fertility goddesses? That question simply reflects the fact that it's hard to associate them with later, erotic images of the nude. We don't even know if they were carved by men or women; no evidence exists. There is no reason to believe the first artists weren't women: these figures may be emblems of matriarchal power. The tiny human faces featured in this show include "the oldest portrait of a woman," as the gallery titles one little masterpiece made in the Czech republic 26,000 years ago. The woman's disfigured eye suggests this is an individual portrait, drawn from life. But such verisimilitude appears to have been an exception: human bodies in this show are overwhelmingly abstract, while animals are portrayed with gobsmacking accuracy - from line drawings of reindeer to lions carved on ivory. While humans have been done better, no one - not even Da Vinci - has ever surpassed these ice-age animal portraits. The first cave paintings, discovered in the late 19th century, were dismissed as forgeries: they seemed too good to be the work of "savages." Nowadays, dating techniques have silenced such doubts. The Lion Man, which is believed to be around 40,000 years old. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian So what are we to make of the works that fuse animals and humans? The oldest object here is the Lion Man, a carving pieced together from fragments found in Stadel Cave in the German Alps. About 40,000 years old, this human figure with a lion's head stands tall, reeking of dreams, terror, magical rites and myths. It makes me think of those animal-headed Egyptian gods, with their air of the supernatural. Meanwhile, a clever video installation delves deep into the world of the Lion Man. In a darkened room, images from caves at Chauvet and Pech Merle flash across rock-like surfaces, flickering as if in the firelight by which these paintings were first seen. The effect is thrilling, a great improvement on photographs: we see herds of horses, portraits of lions, as if we were in the caves themselves. In the next room, that sense of idolatry intensifies. The carved head of a musk ox looms out of the shadows, amid stone reliefs of galloping horses; it is like an image of worship. What made animals the real stars of ice-age art? It may be because this art reflects a long-lost system of religious belief that saw animals as supernatural creatures, divine beings, gods. The first artists were not just portraying horses, but horse spirits. It seems highly plausible, as South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams argues in his book The Mind in the Cave, that these artists were shamans who worked in a trance. It was the mammoth, the bison and the horse that captured the imaginations of these artists and inspired their greatest work. As this fascinating exhibition reveals, the modern human mind begins with the same questions about gods and monsters, the same curiosity about nature and capacity for fantasy, that have shaped it ever since.