The first point to notice is that the Transition cannot be explained by climatic change alone: human change was not the direct result of marked environmental change. The crucial period did see a colder climate peaking at about 35,000 years ago, but Neanderthals had survived previous climatic instability.

Art was not simply a foregone conclusion, the final link in a causal chain. It was not the inevitable outcome of an evolving ‘aesthetic sense’, as some writers suggest.

The picture of change in human society that emerges from this recent research throws new light on that aspect of the Transition that has been called the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ and the ‘Creative Explosion’ – that time when recognizably modern skeletons, behaviour and art seem to have appeared in western Europe as a ‘package deal’.

I argue that the first image-makers were acting rationally in the specific social circumstances ... they were not driven by ‘aesthetics’.

The elaborately executed art on the ceiling in the Altamira cave did not fit current notions of Palaeolithic ‘savagery’; it was too ‘advanced’ for the period.

A lack of methodology in Upper Palaeolithic art research has led to confusion of priorities.

I suggest that the type of consciousness – not merely the degree of intelligence – that Neanderthals possessed was different in important respects from that of Upper Palaeolithic people, and that this distinction precluded, for the Neanderthals, both image-making and elaborate burial.

Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.

In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.

For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.