'At the beginning, of course, you can't really pull apart religion and art can you? Art is sacred because it is taking you to this space where you're not just doing the subject/object arm's-length approach to nature, it takes you to a new place and that's a religious activity. It's only as time goes on that religion becomes much more involved with issues around power, and art becomes much more involved with issues around self-expression, and these days, the two often look at each other from separate mountain peaks, peering in a puzzled kind of way through the mists.

'I don't think that primitive human beings just had a ready-made word in their heads that sounded like 'God', and they immediately knew what it was. They were discovering how to be human in a world that was much more complicated because of their intelligence, and because of the new environmental challenges they were working with, and slowly the world - how should I say it? - almost reshapes itself. With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the 'Old Testament' is called 'wisdom', a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.'

It seems that much of the art made around the world at the time of the Ice Age did have a religious dimension, although we can only guess at any ritual use. This art is part of a tradition still very much alive today, and it's also part of an evolving religious consciousness which still shapes many human societies. Objects like this sculpture of swimming reindeer take us into the minds and imaginations of people like us - into a world unseen but understood. And I think it's that ability to see beyond the functional and the physical - to use our imaginations - that ultimately makes us modern. At the time our swimming reindeer were carved in Europe, the people of north-east Asia were about to settle the Americas. That's for the next programme.