From about 100,000 years ago, for 60,000 years, our ancestors appeared to develop very little, making stone tools that were indistinguishable from those created by Neanderthals and living like them as early hunter-gatherers. Then about forty thousand years ago they seem to have made an enormous creative and cultural leap in theadvancement of tool making and in the creation of art.

  Prior to this time human artistic and creative abilities existed but were far less widespread. Portable representations of the human figure have been dated as far back as 502,000 BCE from Africa and 302,000 BCE from present-day Israel. See the Bradshaw Foundation Sculpture Gallery. But from about 35,000 years ago, and over the next fifteen thousand years, throughout the last Ice Age,Cro Magnon’s artistic expression reached a critical mass and spread not only all over Europe, Asia and Siberia but also appeared in Australia and Africa – throughout the old world.