THIS book was written according to a plan of Hugo
Obermaier's, one of the great scholars of pre-historic art. It describes what is known and what is still being debated about the earliest carvings, decora- tions and cave paintings, the Ice Age art of the Upper Palaeolithic period mostly found in Southern France and Northern Spain. It then goes on to deal with the cave art of the "Spanish Levant" which probubly occurred 70,000 years later in 10,000 B.C., and the Arctic art of Northern Scandinavia and Russia which developed later still. Two of the ideas that it raises are parti- cularly interesting: that the art of the "Spanish Levant" was in some way influenced by African work: and that Arctic art, although so much later (5000-1500 B.C.) was in many ways a continuation of Ice Age art. The diagrams, photographs and colour-plates are superb. The colour photographs of Lascaux, for instance, are masterpieces of reproduction.
J. S.
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