CGI reconstruction of Avebury Henge, from ‘Standing with Stones’, by Rupert Soskin and Michael Bott

We were, had the world not closed ranks against the pandemic, supposed to have been running a workshop at Avebury this summer, looking at some of the less obvious sites and addressing some of the deeper questions posed by the presence within our landscape of such a remarkable ancient site. One of the questions we might have asked is why, given all the evidence to the contrary, society in general still persists in seeing our ancestors as uncultured and brutish when we have been aware, for a very long time, that this is not so.

In 1939 a sculpture was found in Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein. Carved of mammoth ivory, the Löwenmensch, as the lion-headed anthropomorphic sculpture became known, was determined to be some 40,000 years old and is one of the oldest known examples of…