Sublime

In order to create such an artefact, the stone knapper must choose a suitable rock, then set to work chipping away at it – with, all the time, an idea of the finished shape in their mind. An abstract idea – ‘teardrop’ – is made real. A capacity for symbolic thinking is demonstrated by the ability to make that symbol into a physical object. A virtua

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.

Across large geographic expanses, and through time, these Palaeolithic people were doing things in many different ways – from the types of stone tools they made to the way they treated the bodies of the dead. And it’s that variability – which surely represents the ability to create culture, to innovate, to think and behave in ways which seem human

not, as might be expected, in caves, but out in the open, where most Palaeolithic people lived out their lives.

If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.