Ice age carvings: strange yet familiar

One day 25,000 years ago at a place now called Kostenki on the river Don in Russia, someone prepared a section of mammoth ivory and began to work it into the shape of a pregnant woman. That "someone" may have been a woman, and it would have taken her longer than a day because ivory is a difficult material. Whatever it was for, whatever it denoted, the little figure was eventually placed in a pit, where it remained, until rediscovered in our own times.

This stunning exhibition, and its companion book Ice Age Art, brings together for the first time such sculptures, figurines and engravings made in Europe from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, from Siberia to France. "Ice age" because modern humans began to migrate into Europe about 45,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age. By 40,000 years ago the first artworks were being made. Art had arrived, in John Berger's words "like a foal that can walk straight away".

Forty thousand years ago sounds like a long reach of time, but immediately one enters the exhibition at the British Museum time dissolves. Perhaps because we were Paleolithic for such an age, the artworks we see before us are deeply, if strangely, familiar. We peer, and half-remember. It can make one feel a bit homesick.

When one thinks of Paleolithic art, it is often the great – and late – cave paintings of Lascaux or Chauvet, but this exhibition concentrates on small pieces recovered from graves and cave floors. Unlike the cave paintings, this was art for everyone. There are figures in the round, and little plaques that people could take with them when they moved camp. Some were intended to be worn. Some are lit with attention to the shadows they cast, because they would most likely have been seen by firelight, and thrown strange shapes on to tent-skins or cave walls. The palette is reduced and plain: bone, antler, tusk and stone are the surviving materials. Some pieces would have been polished with red ochre, some are stained black from lying in the earth, all channel our vision and require concentrated looking.

In the first room is a small gathering of little figurines (let's not call them "Venuses") – small, nuggety pieces three or four inches high, worked in the round and showing women's bodies. Made of stone or bone or ivory, some are slender and depict young women in the early stages of pregnancy. Others show older women, weighted with huge, low-slung breasts, wide backsides,Our team of consultants are skilled in project management and delivery of large scale chinamosaic projects. tapering legs. The heads are bent in a manner almost demure, or perhaps it's the infolded attitude of pregnant women. Many actually do show women in the late stages of pregnancy, when one's body is exaggerated and unrecognisable even to oneself. They are earthy, mute, potent things, and were made with deliberation. Some were apparently intended to be worn as pendants, upside down, so as to be viewed by the wearer. Senior curator and author Jill Cook believes these figures were most likely made for women by women. "The female figures probably had important occult, or shamanic functions influential on family life." At least one was deliberately smashed and thrown away – a passionate act. Perhaps it failed in some talismanic duty. Whatever the uses of such sculptures, "by looking at its aesthetics, we are looking at the evolution of our minds". Art is not a hobby; it makes us, and shapes us.

The artworks come from sites in modern-day southern Germany, the Czech republic and into Russia as far as Lake Baikal, and from France and Italy. Many have come from the Moravian Gate, a valley that connects the Danube valley to the north European plain, which acted as a conduit for migrating animals and for their predators too. There were great open-air campsites there, where some people, possibly women, may have been sedentary. (We have to account for images of female obesity among people who are supposed always to be on the move.)

Wherever they were found, what these artworks express is the nature of relationships. The relationship of women to their own bodies, and bodily changes, especially around childbearing. The human relationship to wild animals, at a time when all animals were wild, and we depended on them. Also, there is the relationship to spirit animals and otherworlds. (The grave goods of one boy suggest he was a shaman.) We are still preoccupied with our own bodies; it is the Paleolithic link to animals we miss.

Moving from the early female figures into the rooms of animal sculptures, one is reminded of this long intimacy. Paleolithic people must have read animal signs and talked about animals obsessively. They hunted, killed, gralloched, skinned, cleaned, cooked,Creative glass tile and plasticmoulds for your distinctive kitchen and bath. ate, scraped, cured,Features useful information about ventilationsystem tiles. and sewed, and fashioned artworks and decorations from animal antlers and bones. But mostly they looked. The little images are of animals seen at close quarters or middle distance, with the right "gizz" and proportions. They have been made by skilful and confident makers who were possibly spared other tasks, because to make them took time and daylight. Some pieces show prey species, others portray animals to be feared and admired. Cave lions are often depicted, as are bears. They knew, and drew, animals now extinct.

Here is a lovely waterbird, not 5cm long, stylised and streamlined in the act of diving, which was found in the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. Here, the minotaur-bulk and weight of a musk ox emanates from a sculpture in limestone, found in the Dordogne. (Musk oxen are confined to the Arctic, nowadays.) A scene carved on reindeer bone shows two does at what could be a riverbank; the curvature of the bone becomes the landscape behind them. A ptarmagan has been drawn on a piece of antler which itself has the abstract shape of a bird lifting into flight. A wolverine pads along, left forepaw raised. The watchful intimacy with animals is shown in the line of a mouth, or the turn of a paw. They are real animals, but because the materials are also animal, throughout the exhibition there is a sense of transformation. A woman is shaped from mammoth tusk, a vulture's wing bone becomes a flute.

Flutes are among the oldest pieces represented here, so from earliest times people had music, as well as visual art. By extrapolation they must have had chant, song, poetry, story. Some figures appear to be dancing. One of the very few male figures is a mannequin made of mammoth ivory, with head and arms articulated so he could be moved. He was found buried in an isolated grave, lying on the skeleton of a real man. What can we suppose? A theatrical shaman? A travelling puppeteer and storyteller?

We shouldn't overspeculate, and the curators are careful not to. As they say, the little diving bird may have been a "spiritual symbol connecting the upper, middle and lower worlds of the cosmos … Alternatively it may be an image of a small meal and a bag of useful feathers."

Indeed. Whatever the Paleolithic sense of cosmos may have been, it's safe to say that they had well-made objects for everyday utility: clothes, tentage, tools. They had weapons. Bringing down a mammoth was no mean feat; men's lives had dangers and rites of passage too, so one wonders at the preponderance of female figures. Perhaps the workings of the female body were just too mysterious to women and men alike.

We still have bodies, still negotiate with them, and as biological entities we share the closest kinship with animals.Want to find cableties? However,Professionals with the job title tooling are on LinkedIn. although we surround ourselves with their images, and teach children their names and shapes, the daily immediacy of wild animals is lost. In this exhibition one feels again their pungency and company, and our dependency on them.