Tate Ancient: The Earliest Art

Wed 4th April at 2pm

Ben Roberts

Ben Roberts is Curator of Early Prehistory at the British Museum and a graduate of Sheffield and Cambridge Universities. He has published and lectured widely on Prehistoric Europe. Ben researched and co-wrote the first 40 programmes on the BBC Radio 4 hugely popular series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’.

When was the earliest art? What did it mean? The discoveries of cavepaintings as well as sculpted bone and stone figures in the 19th century stimulated ferocious debates. How could our stone age barbaric ancestors have produced such visually stunning creations? This talk will show how the investigation of early art re-shaped the very understandings of human origins.

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