Human evolution: Of ice and men DAYS before the second world war broke out in 1939, two German scholars packed up a cache of mammoth-ivory fragments they had unearthed in a cave in the south-west of the country. When the pieces were finally fitted together three decades later they were found to form a standing figure, 30cm high, with human legs and an arm but the head of a lion. Der Löwenmensch ("the lion man"), as it came to be called, was carved 40,000 years ago. This imaginative figurine marks a departure from the realistic cave drawings of animals and hunters that came before. Many regard it as the first true work of art. The earliest products of human creativity intrigued the artists of the 20th century. For Pablo Picasso, George Brassaï, Constantin Brancusi and Joan Miró these ancient pieces were proof that making art was an innate human instinct. Picasso was so fascinated by a 23,000-year-old mammoth-ivory "cubist" sculpture of a woman with buttocks to the side of her body that he kept two copies of it in his studio. Museums preferred to sequester material of this kind in ethnographic collections, the better to distinguish them as the products of uncivilised savages from distant history. In the past 30 years, however, archaeologists have begun to re-examine these objects for clues as to how human creativity works. The shift has been prompted in part by an explosion of neurological research into a region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. This is the area devoted to more advanced functions such as making decisions, using language and processing complex and abstract thoughts in words and images. Now the British Museum is bringing these fields together with the first exhibition devoted to the long history of making art. The show, which opens on February 7th, includes some of the earliest portraits, landscapes, sculptures and carvings made by man. It also raises a few profound questions. For example, when did humans change from being hunter-gatherers to skilled artisans? What inspired people to spend hundreds of hours learning how to carve and draw? Why did humans begin to decorate themselves and what did this say about wealth, power and identity? When did objects become less about utility and more about beauty or meaning? Humans migrated from Africa to Europe, via the Middle East, about 45,000 years ago - before the last ice age. They followed mammoths and antelope that moved in search of salt licks through the Moravian gap, a vast grassy plain that leads from the Danube valley up to southern Poland. It is here that many of the earliest discoveries have been made. Drawing on new archaeological research in France, Germany, Russia and central Europe, Jill Cook, the exhibition's curator, has chosen objects that show how people began to focus on particular techniques. Some became sculptors of mammoth ivory, others specialists in firing clay. The objects they created were for the first time symbolic rather than practical. Decorated bones are found in burial sites or in the dark recesses of caves, indicating a preoccupation with the hereafter and the existence of early shamanist rituals. Other objects may have been used to express power or as fertility symbols. The world's oldest known ceramic figure, from near Brno in the Czech Republic, is not a pot or vessel but a woman with large pendulous breasts and fat thighs (pictured). The exhibition opens with "the lion man" (a resin replica; the original is being worked on at its home, the Ulmer Museum in Germany). The objects are presented in chronological order, which allows the viewer to observe how sculptors and carvers slowly learned to choose and prepare tusks and bones for the images they wanted to make. Many of these early artists were fascinated by how animals moved. A bison, made 22,000 years ago in Zaraysk, south-west of Moscow, walks forward with hunched shoulders, her mouth open as if she is calling. The oldest artwork in the British Museum is a 13,000-year-old carving of two reindeer, their antlers swept back as they breach the flowing water, swimming for their lives. As imaginative interpretations of the world, these objects point to creativity as an instinctive pursuit. They were also influential, as can be seen in accompanying pieces of modern art by Brassaï, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Piet Mondrian. "Ice Age Art" is less an archaeological exhibition than an exploration of the human search for and expression of meaning. For example, many of the human figures on show are female - nudes made thousands of centuries before the Greeks, who are often credited for being the first artists. Some are nubile, others more voluptuous and visibly fecund. Interpretations abound for why they exist, whether as sexual fetish symbols or matriarchal avatars. But their significance is that they exist at all, as labour-intensive embodiments of desire. Inspired by such works, Georges Bataille, an influential French literary figure, wrote in 1955 that if Greece represented the first day in art, then these carved tusks and sculpted stones mark the dazzling light of its "early morning."