Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500

Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art.

Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later. One day in 1940 Marcel Ravidat was walking in the Dordogne when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole. Robot had stumbled across the entrance to a network of caves containing more than 600 wall and ceiling paintings of horses, deer, aurochs, ibex, bison and cats dating from 17,000 to 15,000 BCE. The discovery of Lascaux’s caves in the era of the Holocaust and Hiroshima resonated for many. ‘Light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us,’ said Georges Bataille in his 1955 lecture on prehistoric art entitled ‘A Meeting at Lascaux’.