I hit 3,000-year-old art with a hammer

Another, if anything even more extraordinary, prehistoric working area was revealed in the second quarry. This proved to be the site of the butchering of a wild horse, but most remarkably, the bone and flint debris that was so painstakingly excavated over many weeks seems to have been dropped there over just one day, half a million years ago. We do

In 1494 the troops of the French king Charles VIII swept through Italy, and the bronze intended for the horse was sent by Ludovico to his father-in-law Ercole d’Este in the town of Ferrara to make three small cannons. In a draft of a letter to Ludovico a few years later, Leonardo seemed dejected but resigned. “Of the horse I will say nothing,” he w

Behind the iron-rimmed wheels, they found a rectangular stain of darker soil – all that was left of the wooden or wicker carriage of the chariot. And within the carriage, the skeletal remains of the driver, his body tucked into a crouched position to fit him in. In front of the chariot, the archaeologists began to uncover even more bones. Not human

on a wall of rock near Turnbow Cabin is pictured a man on horseback, which must have been made after the arrival of the Spanish in North America; on another rock wall a few miles southwest of Moab is the petroglyph of what appears to be a mastodon—a beast supposedly extinct more than twenty thousand years ago.

Human hunters survived through the peak of the Ice Age in southern Europe – where we find not only their stone, bone and antler tools, but even more extraordinary examples of artistic creativity, from evocative ivory carvings to the mesmerising cave paintings in sites such as Lascaux. The warming of Britain after the Ice Age happened fairly rapidly

In 2003 the site became the focus of a major research project based in the universities of Sheffield and Hull and led by Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn, which immediately achieved spectacular success by revealing the existence of the very first Palaeolithic pictures ever found on the walls of British caves.