All Posts

You are standing in the middle of the Sahara. Around you stretches the greatest desert on Earth, a furnace of sand and bare rock where rain may not fall for years on end. Nothing grows. Nothing moves. The silence is total. Then you look at the rock face in front of you, and the world turns upside down. Painted on the stone, in faded ochre and white, a herd of cattle moves across open grassland. Nearby, a hippopotamus wallows. A crocodile basks. Human figures swim through wate

Somewhere in the deep past, a human being looked at a blank rock and saw, in their mind, an animal that was not there. Then they made it appear. In that moment, or rather across thousands of such moments scattered through the long dawn of our species, something extraordinary happened. A creature began to do what no creature had ever done. To take an idea from inside the mind and set it down in the world. To let a mark of pigment stand for a living beast. To imagine, and then

A painting on a cave wall has survived for forty thousand years. Think of everything it has outlasted. The rise and fall of every empire. The end of the Ice Age. The invention of writing, the wheel, the city. Through all of it, the image endured on its rock, untouched, waiting. Then, in a single careless moment, a visitor reaches out and runs a hand across it. Or wets it to brighten the colours for a photograph. Or sets off a camera flash, again and again. What forty thousand