“For years, scholars regarded the appearance of figurative art as the initiation of an evolutionary process, that art became progressively more sophisticated as humans experimented with styles and techniques and passed this knowledge to the next generation. But a growing body of evidence suggests that modern humans, virtually from the moment they appeared in Ice Age Europe, were able to produce startlingly sophisticated art. Artistic ability thus did not ”evolve,” many scholars said, but has instead existed in modern humans (the talented ones, anyway) throughout their existence.”