While look­ing for some­thing else I found this snip­pet from How Art Made the World. It deals with the exag­ger­ated fea­tures of the Ice Age Venuses. Yes they’re unreal­istic images of women, but why do they look unreal­istic? The answer might be found in the actions of gulls. This seg­ment filled me with ambigu­ous feel­ings, so it’s good to have the oppor­tun­ity to watch it again.

I had to flip back to my ori­ginal com­ments, because I remembered feel­ing quite neg­at­ive about it. Yet look­ing at that clip it seemed that Nigel Spivey was an enga­ging presenter. It is an inter­est­ing topic and a change from the chro­no­lo­gical his­tor­ies and dis­aster porn which make up a lot of is his­tory television.

The other clips avail­able online made it clear what I dis­liked about the pro­gramme. It was the dis­join­ted con­nec­tion between pre­his­tory and his­tory, which can be seen in the clip below.

This clip shows what I liked and dis­liked about the pro­gramme. I liked tak­ing the Egyp­tian images piece by piece and show­ing how an attempt at real­ism pro­duces a dis­tor­ted image. The prob­lem with this explan­a­tion is that it relies on cul­ture. That’s prob­ably right, mod­ern psy­cho­lo­gical exper­i­ments show that artistic styles are learned, so they’re embed­ded in a cul­ture. If that’s the case then the neur­os­cience explan­a­tion fails badly, unless you argue that palaeo­lithic peoples were without cul­ture. This was what I didn’t like about the series. Pre­his­toric explan­a­tions seemed bio­lo­gical and his­toric explan­a­tions were cul­tural. While I think we’re still play­ing out the effect lit­er­acy has on humans, I don’t think that lit­er­at­ure cre­ated what is essen­tially humanity.

Ulti­mately show­ing col­oured sticks to chicks tells you about chicks, but I’m not con­vinced it tells you much about mod­ern humans. If it did then you’d have men going to places to gawp at women with unfeas­ibly large breasts and but­tocks. Oddly some men have — but purely as an aca­demic interest.