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Prehistoric Britain – Dr Christopher and Jacquetta Hawkes

These great advances in man's equipment and powers enabled him to take full advantage of the ideal hunting conditions offered in late glacial Europe, where mammoth, reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, bison and horse throve on the steppe and tundra. In particularly favoured regions, such as south-west France and northern Spain, food supplies were now so easily obtained that the hunters had the economic security and leisure necessary to enable them for the first time to realize some of the spiritual potentialities of their humanity.

Ritual, centred on hunting-magic and fertility cults, must have played a vital part in their lives, and to serve it they built up artistic schools- that produced animal paintings, engravings and carvings hardly to be surpassed in their inspired naturalism.

A desire and veneration for fertility seem to have found expression in statuettes of pregnant women [sic]  that often show a wonderful control of form in their full, voluptuous lines. It is one of the most astonishing events in human history that in this, its first liberation, man's artistic impulse should have created works that still, after 20,000 years, convey genuine aesthetic pleasure, and which can be judged without condescension by any modern standards.

But these spiritual achievements were confined to the centres materially best endowed: that part of western Europe destined to become the British Isles was too remote, too ice-ridden, to support so high a standard of life.