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

The Dover Boat was discovered in September 1992 as part of the building of the A20 Dover bypass.5 It’s probably no exaggeration to say that she’s one of the best, earliest and most completely preserved of prehistoric seagoing vessels. Radiocarbon dates carried out on the outer growth rings of the timbers suggest that she was built sometime between

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 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.

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