The lion and the crucifix

Some 40,000 years ago, a man or a woman, or a group of people, whose names, faces and language we will never know, selected ivory from a mammoth and spent many, many hours in the cold days and long nights of the last ice age in what today is southern Germany, probably next to a fire in a cave, carving a sacred object - an idol which combines the head and shoulders of a lion with the lower body of a man. The statue (which is 31 centimeters high), took some 400 hours of work to sculpt with the implements of the time. In an age when survival was the primary concern of every human, the Lion Man demanded precious reserves of time, energy and thought. It demanded the support of a group. It is the first object that we possess which does not reflect something that exists in nature. It was created for a serious purpose, not to pass the time.

A few years ago, in October 2013, a...