There is a fairytale about the invention of art. A man thousands of years ago saw his own shadow, took up a burnt stick and drew around it. But modern archaeologists have found out that long before that people were painting caves. The cave paintings in Chauvet in France are more than 30,000 years old. Yet those people did not invent art, either. If art had a single inventor, she or he was an African who lived more than 70,000 years ago. That is the age of the oldest work of art in the world, a piece of soft red stone that someone scratched lines on in a place called Blombos Cave.

But then some say "hand axes" shaped by even older ancestors count as art because they show a sense of beauty. If that's true, then art is millions of years old and was invented by someone who looked like an ape. If art is as old as that, it probably did not need to be invented. It is as natural to our species as smiling and running. And who invented those?