Programme Index

Discover 11,128,835 listings and 279,706 playable programmes from the BBC

The Culture Show

Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special

Duration: 59 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC HDLatest broadcast: on BBC Two England

Andrew Graham-Dixon travels to Northern Spain to visit some of the world's oldest works of art, hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the earth. In limestone caves he is astonished to find a series of vivid paintings, some of which are over 33,000 years old, which appear to link modern man to our ice age ancestors.

Back in London, the British Museum is staging one of its most ambitious exhibitions yet, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. Andrew gets a behind-the-scenes preview of the extraordinary highlights and discovers that the world's first commissioned artists were producing highly sophisticated work tens of thousands of years before he previously imagined.

The programme includes contributions from the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, and artist Antony Gormley. Show less

About this data

This data is drawn from the data stream that informs BBC's iPlayer and Sounds. The information shows what was scheduled to be broadcast, meaning it was/is subject to change and may not be accurate. More