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The earliest products of human creativity intrigued the artists of the 20th century. For Pablo Picasso, George Brassaï, Constantin Brancusi and Joan Miró these ancient pieces were proof that making art was an innate human instinct. Picasso was so fascinated by a 23,000-year-old mammoth-ivory “cubist” sculpture of a woman with buttocks to the side of her body that he kept two copies of it in his studio.

In the past 30 years, however, archaeologists have begun to re-examine ice art objects for clues as to how human creativity works. The shift has been prompted in part by an explosion of neurological research into a region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. This is the area devoted to more advanced functions such as making decisions, using language and processing complex and abstract thoughts in words and images.

Now the British Museum is bringing these fields together with the first exhibition devoted to the long history of making art. The show includes some of the earliest portraits, landscapes, sculptures and carvings made by man. It also raises a few profound questions. For example, when did humans change from being hunter-gatherers to skilled artisans? What inspired people to spend hundreds of hours learning how to carve and draw? Why did humans begin to decorate themselves and what did this say about wealth, power and identity? When did objects become less about utility and more about beauty or meaning?

Drawing on new archaeological research in France, Germany, Russia and central Europe, Jill Cook, the exhibition’s curator, has chosen objects that show how people began to focus on particular techniques. Some became sculptors of mammoth ivory, others specialists in firing clay. The objects they created were for the first time symbolic rather than practical.

“Ice Age Art” is less an archaeological exhibition than an exploration of the human search for and expression of meaning. For example, many of the human figures on show are female—nudes made thousands of centuries before the Greeks, who are often credited for being the first artists. Some are nubile, others more voluptuous and visibly fecund. Interpretations abound for why they exist, whether as sexual fetish symbols or matriarchal avatars. But their significance is that they exist at all, as labour-intensive embodiments of desire.