The discovery of the cave art of France and Spain did more than anything else to make the ordinary man aware of the immense significance of the discoveries made in the field of pleistocene man during the nineteenth century. In many ways the superior of the conventionally accepted ‘art’ of the day, the paintings and engravings captured the imagination of people to whom flints and bones meant little. They made real the existence of man in the ice age, and through them men could look into a primitive world, situated not in the distant places of the earth, but close to the centres of modern civilization.