Here it is: ice-age art, a completely non-functional object, not a tool, created before the last big bout of climate change. It’s a beautiful piece, a mammoth tusk carved to resemble a pair of reindeer swimming across a river. Much more complicated to make than the simple stone tools we’ve seen so far: for this you need to kill a mammoth, cut off its tusk with something mighty strong and sharp, carve this elaborately observed work of art with a tool that can give you fine detail, polish it with some poultice you’ve made from locally-found goo, and shine it with a leather hide. Why go to all that trouble? MacGregor calls upon Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to speculate about the origins of religion and art. Williams points out that unlike many important modern religions, which downplay the significance of the here-and-now and encourage worshippers to think about other worlds, this statue—like most primitive art—is verismo (as we call it in the world of opera), about the here-and-now world in which the artist lives. It may be that depicting elements of your world gives you (or makes you think you’ve now got) power over those elements, the way naming something gives you the drop on it—thus, in efforts to avoid hubris, the old Hebrew prohibition against naming God, or the Islamic prohibition against depicting creatures with souls. Many assume you make a statue like these reindeer, or paint the mammoth on the wall of your cave, in order to gain the power to kill it in the upcoming hunt. But that’s only speculation…could be they thought these animals were beautiful and loved ‘em.
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