The Mind In The Cave (Thames & Hudson 60th Anniversary Edition)

Thames & Hudson is celebrating it’s 60th Anniversary! To mark this special birthday we will be reissuing 20 titles from across our list as special editions. Popular when first published, popular now, with the added spice that – enhanced by their unique 60th Anniversary cover and jacket designs – they are set to become collectors items.

An erudite and unanimously praised exploration of cave art and the birth of man’s artistic impulse. "The most comprehensive and convincing exploration for the cave art in Europe so far", Chris Stringer, The Evening Standard. The breathtakingly beautiful art created deep inside the caves of western Europe in the late Ice Age provokes awe and wonder in equal measure. What do these animals and symbols, depicted on the walls of such caves as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, tell us about the nature of the atavistic mind? How did these images spring, sophisticated and fully formed, seemingly from nowhere into the human story?

The Mind in the Cave puts forward the most plausible explanation yet proposed for the origins of image-making and art, with David Lewis-Williams offering a skilful and convincing account of how we became human and, in the process, began to make art. This masterful piece of detective work casts light on the remotest layers of our ancestral history as well as on the nature of our own consciousness and experience.