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As well as the wonderful Pompeii show (running to
the end of September) there’s another exhibition on
at the British Museum until the end of May called
Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind. The modern
mind bit refers to the inclusion of modern art pieces
and there insufferably arty write-ups pegged to each
artefact but you can easily ignore these in the gloom
beloved of museum curators and just enjoy the ice age
exhibits themselves. And they are awesome – a word
somewhat overused today but quite apt when applied
to these small sculptures. Some of them, like the truly
exquisite swimming reindeer fashioned from a
mammoth tusk using stone tools, are from the
museum’s own collection. Others have come from
across Europe and from Russia. All of them are
between 10,000 and 40,000 years old. This is the
oldest figurative art in the world - impossibly ancient
scrimshaw mostly. I have no idea what they tell us
about our very ancient ancestors other than it really
does seem that men have long had a liking for big
bottoms, bellies and breasts.
We know very little about daily life in those distant
cold times but this hasn’t stopped the museum from
using their merchandising imaginations to fill the
exhibition shop with
cave man chic
ranging from horn
beakers and bugles to stag antler magnifying glasses
(man make fire) and linen napkins with reindeer on
them (man make dinner party). Or for the nippers,
how about Monty the cuddly mammoth or, quite
inexplicably, a cave man rubber duck?
The closest the British Museum product range comes
to bedtime for cave man is the
Moscow Faux Fur
Throw
. We assume that cave men slept on and under
furs and for this reason alone I am grateful not to
have been a cave dwelling Ice Age person as I once
spent a night on a bearskin rug in Teddington and
suffered an outbreak of hives the like of which is
rarely seen. What we do know for sure is that for their
beds cave men scraped out shallow pits in the ground,
which they lined with springy plant material.
The earliest evidence of cave man bedding comes
from the Sibudu Cave about 40 miles to the West
of Durban in KwaZulu Natal in South Africa.
Remarkably the “
mattresses”
of layered stems and
leafy material are 77,000 years old. The hunter
gatherers who slept here collected for their beds the
aromatic leaves of Cryptocarya woodii, the bastard
camphor tree or Cape laurel. The chemical
compounds in these leaves, when crushed, as by a
sleeping cave man, can kill insects including
mosquitoes and bed bugs, which, by the way, we have
cave men to thank for as they were originally only
And So To Bed - From Cave Men to the Continental Quilt