Many people look at a modern sculpture and mutter "That sure ain't art." — but at least they have a personal idea of what is and is not art. But take them into an archeological museum and show them a small carved stone, and ask them if it is art or not. They would probably hesitate and finally make a decision on the basis of some feeling about the piece, or a principle learned years ago in school which might be applicable to the question. This is a problem for most people when viewing prehistoric art. On the other hand, they can look at cave paintings and go into raptures about how beautiful it is.

Another problem is how to speak about time periods that are immense, beyond our normal conceptions of time. We have a good grasp of a century, and some feel for a millennium. It has been two millennia since Christ. Two millennia is 20 centuries. When one talks about the history of man or when man started to create art, the numbers in years get too big to be comprehensible. This museum uses the convention of expressing things that happened before Christ in number of centuries before Christ. So 40c, is 4,000 BC. That is, 40c is about 6,000 years ago.

Art is symbolic communication practiced by humans. But this definition is too broad since that would include all language. And intuitively one senses that not all language is art. But if we want to talk about art, especially primitive art, we need to defined it somehow. So let's assume that in addition to being symbolic communication, to be art must provide communication beyond the ordinary level of discourse and use. This means that a laundry list, or accounting records are not art even if they find themselves in a museum display. But a novel or a wall painting probably is. The visual arts then excludes music (an auditory art), novels (a literary art), and dancing (a performance art).

This definition excludes the purely decorative, that is art must attempt to communicate something beyond itself. Thus the decorative arts and furniture may be art, but they may also be just an artifact. Artifacts are objects or images made by man; that is, they are non-natural objects. A jar or a sculpture is an artifact; a mountain or a stone is a natural object. All objects of art are artifacts, but only some artifacts are art.

Communication is something that requires a source and destination. A coffin from ancient Egypt may be a work of art if one feels that the decorations were made by the artist (the source) to communicate something to the owner (before death) or to his relatives or other living people (after death). But likewise one can also view it from the owner's perspective and say the decorations were a communication from him to the gods. The artist in that case is just an intermediary craftsman carrying out the wishes of the owner. Then in all these cases, the artifact that is the coffin would be art, otherwise it is just an artifact of the civilization... rare, expensive, maybe even unique, but not a work of art. Decorated plates and pots for example are often artifacts and not art, but there is not reason a plate might not be constructed or decorated to communicate something to its owner or from its owner to another person who might use it.

Australians like to claim that Australian art of the aboriginal peoples date from very early times, around 500c BC. The first art objects in Europe date from around 300c BC. European cave painting started around 220c and continued until about 100c. That is a long period of time, the cave painting period in Europe lasted 55 times as long as the period of time since Christ and stopped happening 10,000 years before Christ. Prehistoric man painted in caves in Africa, Euro-Asia, Europe, and Australia. In Australia aboriginal descendents are still making cave pictures.

In more recent times, Mayan Indians in Mesoamerica were active cave painters, and the American Indians also did cave paintings.

In the 1950s Russian academics discovered the remains of graves dating back to 280c BC. In them a 60 year old man, a 10 year old girl, and a 12 year old boy were found. They were all decorated with beads, each in a different way. The girl had snow-flake like carvings around her head and torso, the boy had a belt made of fox canine teeth, and the man wore a pendant made of stone in the middle of his chest. So as early as 300c before Christ people were decorating themselves, making distinctions in sex, age, and social position.

About this same time in pre-history, about 300c BC, archeologists have found many miniature sculptures of big-breasted, broad-hipped women. These have been called Venus figurines.